We’ve all heard of someone having a bad psychedelic trip. Many of the headlines around psychedelics are in regards to their lack of safety and instability. They can severely impact a person’s psyche in a way that’s not healing at all.
The psychedelic narrative is notorious for stories riddled with bad trips, psychotic breaks, and extremely challenging feelings that might make someone question why they would ever willingly go on that journey.
Conversely, the psychedelic narrative is also flourishing with stories of profound experiences that changed lives in big and little ways, instilled hope, and healed traumas that felt impossible to overcome.
There’s a lot of conversation in the space that says “you don’t get what you want, you get what you need.” People would even argue that there is no such thing as a bad trip, just bad preparation and facilitation.
I don’t necessarily think that’s true, I think bad trips are certainly possible and even more possible if the proper care isn’t taken ahead of a psychedelic experience. It seems unjust to invalidate someone’s experience of having a “bad trip” by saying they should have prepared better. Even if that’s true.
Let’s first understand what a bad trip might consist of and how to minimize the risks of having one should you walk the psychedelic healing path.
<h2>What’s a bad trip?
A bad psychedelic trip might be categorized as having an overly challenging experience that either leads to feeling like you’re completely losing yourself and you’re holding on for your life or in more extreme cases, psychosis.
It’s hard to decipher a ‘bad trip’ from a ‘good trip’ because for many people, depending on the substance, the experience can have qualities of both. It’s also subjective, someone’s bad trip might be described as a good trip from the perspective of someone else.
By nature, psychedelic experiences are meant to be challenging to some degree. The purpose of these medicine ceremonies is to expose shadow and deeper truths about self, and bring them to the light so that you can do the work to heal and move through whatever the challenge might be.
This in its very nature is not easy and might feel physically, emotionally, and mentally painful. This also often can be accompanied with ego death or the death of self, which is also a terrifying experience to witness and feel. But would this be considered a bad trip if the end result ended up being healing, bringing someone insight that they never would have had before?
It’s also subjective to define trips in the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with the exception of psychosis. This brings up the point that there needs to be more screening processes in place so that a person with a predisposition to a psychotic break under the influence of psychedelics would not embark on such a journey.
With proper planning, attention to detail, and an understanding of how psychedelics work, there are ways to minimize the risk of having a bad trip.
<h2>Lack of education
Psychedelic education is one of the most important pieces of your readiness to journey.
To harp on this point again, because it’s the most important of them all, not safely understanding the risks of psychedelics and their interactions with certain pre-existing medical conditions or certain medications can lead to very scary and unfathomable outcomes.
I don’t say this lightly, it’s so important to understand these implications and know your family and medical history before taking psychedelic substances.
Every substance interacts in the body a bit differently, so being specific about which psychedelic substance you’ll explore and how it can affect you physiologically and mentally is important.
Knowing what to expect going into these ceremonies is crucial. Some substances may induce nausea and vomiting, shaking, hallucinations, or cause trauma to bubble to the surface. Having this knowledge in advance can ease your worries should it start happening to you. You’ll know that this was possible and your mind will settle into that without overthinking that something is severely going wrong.
The most important thing to do before any psychedelic ceremony or journey is to do your research and know the risks. Talk with a trusted medical advisor or someone that is knowledgeable in the topic.
You’ll want to pay attention to how other medications can interact with specific substances, as well as the most compromised populations on a substance-per-substance basis.
This is by far the best thing you can do for your own safety and well-being to risk not having a psychotic break should you be someone who would react negatively to the medicines based on your neurochemistry.
<h2>Not curating a safe container
The setting of the psychedelic experience is key to feeling safe, supported, and able to drop in. Not only is this important for your physical safety, but also for your emotional safety as well.
When you enter the psychedelic experience, there’s no turning back, and many of the experiences can last upwards of five hours.
Make sure you’re safely set up during this time so that your mind can anchor to the setting and go into the journey without fear of what’s happening just outside of your physical body.
I raise a lot of caution to people who want to partake in psychedelics during raves, concerts, parties, or highly stimulating environments in general. Unless you have the experience and plan to take a lower dose, I would highly suggest not participating in these medicines in these types of settings.
For the sake of ceremony and healing containers, trusting the facilitators, guides, and sitters is incredibly important, as they’re the ones who are going to be taking care of you while you’re journeying. Feeling like you can drop into the experience has a lot to do with this, as well as being able to navigate the journey as it’s happening internally.
Without a safe container, the experience can feel threatening and out of your control.
Avoid having a bad trip by paying careful attention to this, participating in ceremonies that have been vetted and using your due diligence to ask questions and familiarize yourself before you dive headfirst into a trip. Trust me this is worth it.
<h2>Not knowing what you’re taking or mis-dosing
The tricky part about psychedelic substances is that there are lots of different kinds, all which have different effective doses and affect different parts of the brain.
If you don’t know exactly what you’re taking or how much, you’re setting yourself up to go spiraling into the unknown at rapid speeds.
There’s also the added factor of these substances still being illegal, which means they’re often purchased on the street and not pure. MDMA is the most likely to be impure and cut with other substances.
To mitigate the risk of not knowing what you’re taking, buy a drug testing kit and do your homework on what these substances should look like and where you can acquire them as safely as possible. The more you know about the substance going into the experience, the better. This is another reason why psychedelic education is so important in this coming of age where psychedelics are being used to treat mental health conditions.
When it comes to dosing, also do you research and understand how each substance’s dosages work. For example, psilocybin mushrooms are measured in grams. A microdose would be considered .1-.2 of a gram, while a hero or macrodoes would be 5-7 grams. LSD on the other hand is measured in micrograms. A microdose of LSD is 5-15 micrograms while a macrodose is 200 micrograms.
Knowing this information before hand can help guide you to start low, go slow, and titrate up as needed. You can always go up in dose, but you can’t go down. Treating these medicines as they’re meant to be treated means taking it slow. No need to be a hero on your first experience, in fact, it’s highly recommended to not do that.
Psychedelics take practice just like anything else, so take it easy and you’re likely to have much better and tangible takeaways. Higher doses that are intended to blow you out of the water are recommended for true psychonauts and people who have had a lot of experiences with psychedelic substances in general.
<h2> Not setting a proper intention or feeling connected to it
A lot of people mistake intention for outcome. Setting an intention is merely a guidepost and something you’re looking for insight on to help guide the journey, it’s not meant to be an expectation or a hard and fast result-oriented expectation.
In a lot of ways, approaching it this way will lead to disappointment, especially when you’re in the journey and it’s not going how you thought it would. This can lead to a lot of resistance and fighting what’s actually coming up, which in turn can lead to a bad trip.
Setting an intention takes a lot of careful internal reflection, listening, and practicing. It’s recommended to work with a psychedelic integration coach to help you clarify what your intention might be going into the journey.
Once you land on your intention, it’s important to sit with it and make sure you feel connected to it. This is going to be what you’ll anchor to during the journey so this piece is extremely important.
Take your time with this, don’t wait until the day before you embark to come up with something and don’t just read the first thing that comes up on Google when looking up intentions for psychedelic journeys.
The more you can fit this to you, the more impact it’s going to have on your entire experience.
<h2>Take your time approaching psychedelics to avoid a bad trip
Overall, the most important thing you can do in preparation for your psychedelic experience to make it the most impactful is to take your time to think through the details. Be mindful of what you’ll take, where you’ll participate, what intention you want to bring in.
Education is so important when it comes to embarking on these journeys, the more you can know about the experience, how the medicine might affect you, and what to expect going into it, the more your mind will be able to drop in safely without overwhelming panic and confusion.
Psychedelic substances across the board are extremely powerful medicines meant to be combined with integration and the want to weave the experience into your daily life.
Bad trips are always possible, but with careful preparation, the risk can be greatly reduced that this might happen to you.
