Yaakov is a 30-year-old Orthodox Jewish father of two in New York. He was working with a life coach to try and improve his life and self-optimize. In May, the life coach suggested they go for a trek in a large park, wearing weights, on magic mushrooms. This, the coach insisted, would be character-building. Yaakov was unsure, having never done mushrooms before, but the coach urged him to go for it. Psychedelics are surprisingly popular among Orthodox Jewish Americans, and Yaakov decided to try it.
He arrived at the park to discover the coach had not brought any water for the trek. The coach told him to go for it anyway, so he did. He took two grams of mushrooms, and they set off. What followed was one of the most horrendous experiences of his life. Yaakov’s habitual anxiety was exacerbated. He didn’t feel safe at all. The coach was not a calm, sympathetic ‘space-holder’ but a militaristic bully. And the thirst was unbearable. The hours seemed to last forever as Yaakov staggered, gasping, through the park.
We might remark, in passing, on the casual fuckwittery of this ‘life coach’, presuming to incorporate psychedelics into his work as if they were no riskier than electrolytes or Omega oils. But that is not the focus of this article.
In the days and weeks afterwards, Yaakov remained in a state of extreme anxiety. He worried about losing his mind, worried about not being able to work, worried about the stigma of having damaged himself on drugs, worried about the derealization he could experience all day, and worried above all that these symptoms would last forever. Sometimes he would wake up feeling pure fear like he’d never felt before.
Yaakov has a therapist who, though not familiar with psychedelics, is still supportive and helpful to him. He has looked for other help, including the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which he contacted in August. He feels bewildered by all the options - should he try hypnotherapy or acupuncture or trauma therapy or medication? His health anxiety, exacerbated by the bad trip, sometimes goes into overdrive and he feels paralysed by choices.
Yaakov has now decided that over-thinking is making the situation worse. He says: ‘This week I’ve started with a very straight-forward approach of living life, not ruminating or fantasising about it. Today is Tuesday, and as I try the new approach of not ruminating, I’m having a pretty good day today, probably one of the best in the last three months. There’s times when I think ‘let me go and search for the best health supplements’ or something, and I think ‘no Yaakov, you’re not doing this right now’.
Rumination as a causal factor for extended difficulties
Why do some bad trips lead to extended post-psychedelic difficulties? Why do some people feel bad for a few days, and others for months or years? We don’t yet know but it’s likely to be various reasons - how awful the experience was, how much support was available afterwards, the circumstances of the person’s life, and perhaps their childhood history or personality traits.
But I suspect one of the main reasons is rumination. Rumination is what turns a transient dip into a sustained one.
This is my working hypothesis of what happens in many cases of extended post-psychedelic difficulties: there’s an adverse event (a bad trip) which leads to unwanted symptoms, such as negative feelings, negative thoughts or unwanted phenomena like nightmares or visual distortions or derealization.
For some people, these symptoms arise and then pass after a few days or weeks without them obsessing over them, and the mind’s natural healing properties allow it to bounce back. But other people (and this is just a hypothesis) ruminate and catastrophize over the adverse event and the unwanted symptoms, they become much more self-focused and hyper-monitoring, and every time an unwanted symptom occurs it contributes to the catastrophising beliefs ( particularly the belief - ‘I am permanently broken’) and to worse mood, more negative self-focus, and to withdrawal from the world, from relationships, from work. It becomes a vicious loop, and people can be stuck in that whirlpool for a long time.
A few people I’ve interviewed for our ‘Stories of Recovery’ say that one of the key things that helped them recover from post-psychedelic difficulties was finding ways to ruminate less and turn one’s focus outwards. I met Matias at Psychedelic Science 2023 - he’d traveled there from Argentina searching for a cure for the intense derealization he experienced for four years after vaping DMT. I kept in touch with Matias, and he told me his symptoms eventually diminished. What helped?
When it all began, I assumed the way back would be more inner work — more meditation, more breathwork, more spiritual practice. I even thought I needed to do regular Holotropic Breathwork to work through the material. Over time I learned the opposite was true, at least for me. Any practice that turned my attention inward — meditation, breathing exercises, energy work, even “grounding” by walking barefoot — reliably made things worse. There was some pattern inside me that wasn’t working properly, and stirring it up was like pouring gas on a fire. What actually helped was the opposite direction: going to the gym, coming back into my body and into ordinary life.
This insight has a much broader application than post-psychedelic difficulties. Rumination is put forward by some psychologists as one of the main causes of depression and anxiety, as well as a key contributor to stress, insomnia, burn-out, procrastination and other common forms of vexation. The word ‘rumination’ comes from rumen, meaning one of the four compartments in which a cow slowly digests grass. What works well for cow digestion works much less well for human cogitation - excessive rumination can literally make us grind our teeth and give us a stomach ache!
So if we are prone to chewing the mental cud, what can we do about it?
How to think less
From our first months, we are taught how to think and solve problems, and trained to live in a highly complex society and to play a part in the knowledge economy. We are thinking machines, and our problem-solving mind is like a chainsaw, helping us hack a way through the complexity of modern life. Every night we go to bed with the chainsaw, and sometimes we don’t know how to switch it off.
Many of the leading spiritual teachers of the last century recognized that over-thinking is one of the great psychospiritual issues that modern humans face. Alan Watts, for example, gets millions of views on YouTube with his talks on why modern humans over-think and get lost in the ‘symbolic world’, and how to use ideas from Zen and Taoism to think less and have a less mediated and more direct experience of reality. Eckhart Tolle became perhaps the leading spiritual teacher of the Noughties with his simple message of how to liberate yourself from an over-thinking mind.
In the age of smartphones and social media, we’re perhaps even more addicted to thinking and people flock to diagnoses and cures for this very modern ailment - my friend Alex Olshonsky, a life coach in the Bay Area, wrote an essay in February called ‘You’re probably addicted to thinking’, which got 5000 likes on Substack, leading him to launch a new course on the topic which is starting next week (you can see a brief interview I did with Alex after the paywall).
So how can we think less?
There are several possible methods to reduce rumination. Two experimental methods that I know many of you are interested in are psychedelics and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). A mini-review in 2024 found that psychedelic-assisted therapy significantly reduced rumination, while TMS for depression has also been found to reduce rumination (check out this recent ‘before and after TMS’ video featuring Owen Muir and a patient).
But there are less experimental techniques with a lot more evidence that one can try first. There’s plenty of evidence that regular exercise reduces rumination, especially if you try something that demands continuous attention, such as swimming, cycling, running, tennis/pickleball, martial arts, surfing. These are methods of re-directing your attention out of introspection and rumination and towards an external activity (sport also has the advantage of releasing endorphins, getting you in shape, raising your self-esteem and connecting you to others).
There are also various forms of cognitive therapy which have been found effective at retraining the mind and reducing rumination, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-based CBT, Compassion-Focused Therapy, and a relatively new but promising form of therapy called Meta-Cognitive Therapy (MCT) which I have been finding quite helpful. In the rest of the article I’m going to briefly explain MCT and share some of its exercises and practices, then I’ll share the video of my conversation with Alex Olshonsky.
