Why do people say "It felt like 3 years of therapy in one day!"
MAKING SENSE OF IT — a weekly research series
I spent over a decade as an academic researcher at Tilburg University, studying health, wellbeing, and mental health from a social science perspective. Since 2019, I have also been doing research specifically on psychedelics.
And then life took a turn — and I moved from studying this work to actually doing it.
But the researcher in me never left. If anything, she got more curious.
There is a lot of research on psychedelics out there. Good research. Research that deserves more than to sit behind a paywall and collect dust.
So this is my contribution — every week, one study. In plain language. No jargon, no oversimplification. Just an honest attempt to make sense of what we are learning about this work and why it matters.
SO, WHY DOES IT FEEL LIKE THREE YEARS OF THERAPY IN ONE DAY?
People say this all the time after a psychedelic experience. And most of us in this field have heard it so often that we almost take it for granted.
But what is actually happening?
A study published in October 2024 in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs took a closer look. Researchers surveyed over 440 people about their most meaningful psychedelic experience — what happened during it, and what shifted afterward.
They looked at four things:
Mystical experiences — those moments of feeling deeply connected to something larger than yourself, a sense of oneness, timelessness, the boundaries between you and the world dissolving
Emotional breakthroughs — finally feeling something you had been avoiding for years, crying in a way that releases rather than drowns, suddenly understanding something about yourself that had been just out of reach
Challenging experiences — the difficult moments of fear, panic, confusion, or paranoia that can arise during a psychedelic journey
Changes in dysfunctional attitudes — and this one needs a proper explanation, because "dysfunctional attitudes" is exactly the kind of term that makes people's eyes glaze over.
WHAT ARE DYSFUNCTIONAL ATTITUDES?
They are the rigid, overgeneralised beliefs we carry about ourselves, others, and the future. The inner critic that has been running in the background for so long you stopped noticing it.
Things like:
"I must be perfect or I am worthless."
"If I fail at this, it means I am a failure as a person."
"Nobody will really take me seriously."
"I don't deserve to ask for what I need."
"If people really knew me, they would leave."
These are not just passing thoughts. They are deeply embedded narratives — often formed early in life — that shape how we feel, how we relate, and what we believe is possible for us. Cognitive therapy has spent decades trying to shift them. They are stubborn. They are also, apparently, responsive to psychedelics.
WHAT DID THE RESEARCH FIND?
All four factors were linked to changes in wellbeing. But not equally.
The shift in dysfunctional attitudes was by far the strongest predictor — statistically, it explained roughly 3 to 8 times more of the change in wellbeing than the acute experiences during the journey itself.
Among the experiences that happened during the journey, emotional breakthroughs had the strongest positive link to wellbeing. Challenging experiences had a negative effect — more distress during the journey was associated with smaller improvements afterward. And mystical experiences, while meaningful, contributed the least unique variance once everything else was taken into account.
In plain language: what seems to matter most is not the peak of the experience — the mystical dissolution, the awe, the transcendence. What matters most is whether the story you tell about yourself quietly shifted in the days and weeks that followed.
BUT HERE IS WHAT THE STUDY IS ACTUALLY MEASURING
And this is where I want to be honest with you — because this is where a lot of science communication gets sloppy.
This study did not measure what psychedelics actually do to the brain. It did not follow people over time with objective assessments. It asked people to look back at a past experience and recall how they felt before, what happened during, and what changed after.
Everything in this study is perception, memory, and retrospective reconstruction.
Which means the headline finding is more precisely this:
People who remembered their inner critical narrative softening after a psychedelic experience also remembered feeling significantly better — more so than people who recalled more intense mystical or emotional experiences during the journey itself.
This might sound like terrible news for how solid these results are. But this is not a small finding. Memory is not neutral, and perception matters. How people make meaning of their experience is clinically relevant. And the consistency across multiple statistical methods adds weight.
But it is not the same as saying: psychedelics heal you by changing your thinking.
What it does say — carefully, honestly — is that on average, people reported a decrease in those rigid self-critical beliefs after their experience. Not a dramatic shift in numbers, but a consistent direction across a large group of people.
And again — this is what they remembered. And when hundreds of people independently recall the same kind of shift, that pattern is important.
WHAT THIS MEANS IN PRACTICE
If you have ever done a psychedelic experience and wondered why the insights seemed to stick in a way that felt different from regular reflection — this might be part of the answer.
It is not just what you experienced in the room.
It is whether the voice that used to say "you are not enough" got a little quieter afterward.
And whether, in the weeks that followed, you started making different choices — not because you forced yourself to, but because something had simply shifted.
That is what the research is pointing at.
Next time, another study. Another piece of the puzzle. 🌿
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