Psychedelics Don't Just Change Your Mind. They Change Your Body-Baseline
The shared biology of autism, ADHD, and PTSD — and why breathwork and psychedelics address what talk therapy misses
What Autism, ADHD, and PTSD Have in Common? There's a question I get asked a lot, in different forms.
How can someone be both autistic and have PTSD? Why do so many ADHD people also struggle with trauma? What does neurodivergence have to do with stress disorders?
The answer is not that these conditions are the same. They're not. But they share something fundamental — something that sits beneath the labels, beneath the symptoms, beneath the diagnostic categories.
They all involve the body's regulatory system going wrong in a very similar direction.
And they all share a second feature that is less talked about, but just as important: a disrupted relationship with the body's own signals.
The common thread
In the first post in this series, I wrote about how neurodivergent nervous systems run differently — with the sympathetic gas pedal higher at baseline, and the parasympathetic brake less able to engage flexibly. The system is chronically activated. It runs hot.
PTSD does something strikingly similar — but through a different route.
Where neurodivergence creates a nervous system that is structurally more sensitive and less able to filter, trauma creates a nervous system that has learned — through experience — that the world is not safe. The amygdala, the brain's alarm centre, loses its ability to habituate. Familiar, neutral things continue to trigger a threat response.
The brake stops working.
The body stays in a state of vigilance that is no longer responsive to actual context.
Different origins. Convergent outcomes.
A 2023 clinical study put 27 people with diagnosed PTSD and 15 healthy controls through a standardized stress test — and then measured what was happening in their bodies at the biological level. The picture that emerged was consistent across every marker they tested.
The PTSD group's nervous systems were already running higher before the stress even began. Their bodies were in a state of chronic activation at rest — the kind of low-grade alert that should only appear when something threatening is actually happening.
At the same time, the system that normally brings the body back down — the stress hormone cortisol, which acts as a natural brake on both the alarm response and inflammation — was blunted. Quieter than it should be. Less able to do its job.
And heart rate variability — the measure of how flexibly the nervous system can move between states of activation and rest — was markedly lower in the PTSD group. The brake wasn't just slow. It had lost its range of motion.
Higher baseline activation. Less capacity to recover. More inflammation running in the background. It's the same pattern we see in neurodivergent nervous systems — but arrived at through a different door. In neurodivergence, it comes from how the system is built. In PTSD, it comes from what the system has lived through. The starting points are different. The destination is strikingly similar.
Which raises an important question for many people in this community: what happens when you have both?
When you are neurodivergent — already running at higher sensitivity, already with a less flexible brake — and you experience trauma on top of that?
The systems compound. A nervous system that was already running closer to its ceiling has less buffer when something overwhelming hits. The adaptations deepen. The hypervigilance intensifies. The window of tolerance — the zone where you can function, feel, and be present — narrows further.
This is not a rare combination. It is, for many neurodivergent people, simply the shape of a life.
Where neurodivergence creates a nervous system that is structurally more sensitive and less able to filter, trauma creates a nervous system that has learned — through experience — that the world is not safe.
The part nobody talks about: interoception
Here is where I want to introduce something that I think is one of the most important and most overlooked pieces of this picture.
Interoception is the body's ability to sense its own internal state. It's how you know you're hungry before you've consciously thought about food. It's how you feel your heart rate rise when you're anxious. It's the capacity to sense tension in your chest, or warmth in your face, or a tightening in your stomach — and to know what those signals mean.
It sounds simple. But for many neurodivergent people, and for many people with trauma histories, this system is significantly disrupted.
And it's disrupted in different ways depending on the person — which is part of why it's so confusing.
Some people with neurodivergence and trauma are hyperaware of body signals — they feel everything, amplified, and struggle to know what to do with the information. Every heartbeat is noticeable. Every subtle bodily change becomes something to monitor and interpret. The body's signals become a source of anxiety rather than information.
Others are hyposensitive — they've learned to disconnect from body signals as a way of managing overwhelm. They don't feel cold when they should. They don't register hunger or fatigue until it's critical. They've turned the volume down on the body's messages so far that they struggle to hear them at all.
A 2026 meta-analysis found something important about how trauma affects the relationship with the body. It's not that people with PTSD simply feel less — or simply feel more. It's that the system becomes unbalanced in a specific way.
The higher someone's level of hyperarousal — that chronic state of being on alert — the more likely they were to feel disconnected from their own body. Almost as if the body becomes too dangerous to inhabit, so the mind learns to leave it.
At the same time, the ability to notice body sensations at all was linked to more re-experiencing and avoidance. The body's signals, when they do break through, tend to arrive as threat rather than information.
The researchers' conclusion was that this imbalance may actually keep trauma-related distress alive — because the body and the mind are no longer in a functional conversation with each other.
In plain terms: after trauma, the body becomes a complicated place to live. Sometimes it's too loud — every sensation amplified, every internal signal interpreted as danger. Sometimes it's too quiet — a kind of numbness, a disconnection, a sense of not quite being present in your own physical experience. And often it oscillates between both, sometimes within the same day.
Either way, something has been disrupted. Not the signals themselves — the body keeps sending them. But the capacity to receive those signals as neutral information, rather than as something to fear or escape, has been lost.
The term "interoceptive awareness" in clinical practice actually originated with clinicians working specifically with trauma and PTSD. The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, whose work has influenced an entire generation of trauma therapists and is cited in a recent study, observed that people with PTSD have trouble attending to internal sensations because they commonly become overwhelmed by residual trauma-related perceptions, emotions, and sensations. He advocated for developing interoceptive capacity as a core treatment target — not as a supplement to therapy, but as the foundation of it.
Why this matters for how we work
This brings me to something I want to be direct about.
In neurodivergent people, interoceptive awareness is also frequently atypical — though again, not uniformly in one direction. Some autistic and ADHD people are hypersensitive to body signals. Others have significant difficulty identifying their own emotions or physical states — a phenomenon sometimes called alexithymia, the inability to read one's own emotional signals clearly. Many oscillate between the two depending on context and arousal level.
What this means practically is that many people who come to body-oriented work — whether breathwork, somatic practices, or psychedelic ceremony — arrive with a complicated relationship to their own body's signals. Either the body feels like too much, or it feels like very little. Either they're overwhelmed by sensation, or they've learned not to feel it.
And this is precisely why the design of the work matters so much.
At Hearts Door Retreats, body-oriented practices are not a warm-up. They are not a complementary add-on to the "real" work of the ceremony. They are the foundation — and they serve a specific, deliberate function.
The practices we use before ceremony are designed to build interoceptive capacity. The ability to notice what is happening in the body — a tightening here, a warmth there, a shift in breath — without immediately labeling it as good or bad. Without immediately reacting to it. Just noticing. Just receiving the signal.
This sounds simple. For many people, especially those with neurodivergent nervous systems and trauma histories, it is one of the most challenging things they have ever been asked to do.
Because the body has often become a place that doesn't feel safe. A place where signals mean threat, or where signals are absent and that absence itself is unsettling. Learning to be in the body with curiosity rather than judgment — to say "I notice my chest is tight" rather than "something is wrong" — is a practice that has to be built slowly, carefully, with support.
This is what we do in preparation.
Why this matters in ceremony
When you sit with psilocybin — or in any deeply altered state — the body speaks loudly. Physical sensations intensify. Emotional material surfaces through the body before it surfaces through thought. The stomach tightens. The chest opens. Breath changes. Tears come.
For someone who has no practice in receiving body signals without immediately reacting to them, this can be overwhelming. The experience becomes something to manage and survive rather than something to move through.
For someone who has been building interoceptive capacity — who has practiced, even imperfectly, the ability to notice without immediately judging — the same intensity becomes navigable. Not comfortable necessarily. But workable. Something that can be followed rather than fought.
The capacity to label what is happening — "I feel pressure in my throat," "my hands are warm," "something is releasing in my chest" — creates a sliver of space between sensation and reaction. And that sliver of space is where the healing work happens.
Research on interoception and fear learning confirms this logic: heightened awareness of physiological reactivity combined with attention to body sensations can result in more negative predictions and greater avoidance — but this dynamic can also be shifted. When interoceptive awareness is developed as a skill rather than experienced as a threat, it becomes a resource for regulation rather than a source of overwhelm.
The daily practice is the preparation
None of this happens in a single session. Not in a single ceremony. Not in a single retreat.
The nervous system learns slowly. It changes through repetition — through the accumulation of small experiences of being in the body without catastrophe. Each time you sit with a sensation and it passes. Each time you notice anxiety without being consumed by it. Each time you breathe slowly and feel the body respond.
This is why the daily practice is not optional in the way we work. It is the preparation. It is also the integration. It is what makes the ceremonial work possible, and what allows the shifts from ceremony to consolidate into the body's new baseline.
Breathwork. Movement. Body-oriented awareness practices. These are not wellness extras. They are the training ground for the nervous system — the place where it slowly, carefully learns that it is allowed to feel, and that feeling does not equal danger.
For people with neurodivergent nervous systems and trauma histories, this is perhaps the most important thing of all.
Not to fix the body. Not to make it less sensitive or less responsive.
But to make it a place you can come home to.
Post by co-founder Ioana
At The Heart's Door, we work with psilocybin in ceremonial contexts and support structured integration practices. Curious about our retreats combining psilocybin, breathwork and body-oriented practices? Read about our work here
