Six Years of Insomnia and Three Hours of Psilocybin
I wasn't expecting a sleep improvement. I was expecting insight about anxiety. I got both, in an order I didn't anticipate.
Six years is a long time to sleep badly. Six years of taking 45 minutes or more to fall asleep, of waking at 3am with the full lights-on activation of a brain that doesn't know how to rest.
I tried everything that is supposed to work. CBT-I. Sleep restriction. Melatonin in seventeen different formulations. I improved incrementally and remained a bad sleeper.
The session wasn't specifically about sleep. My intention was about the anxiety that I believed was causing the insomnia. At 1.5 grams, the experience was gentle but real: visual enhancement, emotional openness, a long period of lying still listening to music with my full attention.
What I noticed, a week after the session, was that I was falling asleep faster. Not dramatically. Not every night. But the average had shifted. The 3am wake-up happened less often.
I don't know the mechanism. I've read about psilocybin and sleep architecture, about REM changes, about the effects on the amygdala's threat response. What I know is that I sleep better than I have in six years, and that this wasn't what I was looking for, and that I'm grateful for the accident.
More Experience Reports
Three years of talk therapy, one psilocybin session, and a fundamentally different relationship with anxiety. A first-timer's account of a licensed Oregon session.
Read →What happens when you underestimate a potent strain. A first-person account of a difficult experience, how the STOP protocol made the difference, and what emerged from the center of it.
Read →A Marine veteran with treatment-resistant PTSD reflects 60 days after participating in a university psilocybin clinical trial. The session didn't cure anything. But the relationship changed.
Read →