Why You Should Consider Taking Psychedelics

In writing content on this blog, Third Wave’s mission is to inform and educate people about the responsible use of psychedelics.

We don’t explicitly encourage psychedelic use for every individual. Consuming such potent substances entails responsibilities. Each person must carry out due diligence on the reasons why they want to take a psychedelic.

But as we’ve written about before, there are measurable benefits to taking a substance like LSD. In our next series of blog posts, we will highlight these advantages, providing details on why LSD can be a powerful tool for change. We will include concrete examples of authority figures who leveraged LSD for personal and career gain.

PRODUCTIVITY (WELL, WITH MICRODOSES)

In the past, we have written extensively about the benefits of microdosing. Hell, we spent months (yes, really, months) putting together an easy-to-digest and super informative infographic about microdosing.

As mentioned in both of these resources, anecdotal reports show that microdosing with psychedelics leads to a substantial boost in energy and focus. With higher levels of energy and focus often comes higher levels of productivity.

We will expand more on this in a future article dedicated to only productivity.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

In experiments done with LSD in the 60s on monkeys, those who consumed LSD were more likely to be ostracized by their group.

Why?

Because the monkeys who consumed LSD refused to follow the expectations of their companions.

What’s the relevance of monkeys taking LSD to entrepreneurs?

Entrepreneurs are most effective when they think differently. Innovation is critical to developing a profitable business. When you think outside the box and outside of mainstream expectations, creative ideas are more likely to come about.

Take Steve Jobs as an example. In our post on Psychedelic Quotes, we included the following quote:

“It reinforced my sense of what was important creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

Jobs knew the only way to create ‘great things’ was to think differently. It was to give the people, not what they think they want, but what they need.

And his experience with LSD was a catalyst for such perspective shifts.

We will fully expand on these ideas in our upcoming post, “Why Entrepreneurs Should Take Psychedelics.”

“Entrepreneurs are most effective when they think differently.”

THERAPEUTIC USE

Of the dozens of books on LSD and psychedelics, the premier text when it comes to the therapeutic use of such substances is Stanislav Grof’s LSD: Doorway to the Numinous: The Groundbreaking Psychedelic Research Into Realms of the Human Unconscious.

In his book, Grof delves deep into the world of the perinatal domain, which holds memories of the various stages of birth, and the transpersonal domain, which integrates the spiritual and transcendent experiences of the human experience within the framework of modern psychology.

Through his 17 years of experience with LSD therapy, Grof discovered the myriad benefits of psychedelic therapy. He wrote LSD: Doorway to the Numinous as a way to explain the breakthroughs many of his subjects made while under the influence of psychedelics.

In the past, therapists have used LSD to help treat a laundry list of mental ailments:

– Alcoholism

– Depression

– Anxiety with Terminal Illnesses

– Assistance with General Psychotherapy

The best reference for current psychedelic research is an article written by Michael Pollan for the New Yorker: The Trip Treatment.

SELF-ACTUALIZATION

For those who do not deal with any serious mental health issues, psychedelics can be an excellent tool to accelerate one’s development towards self-actualization.

Self-actualization is a term coined by Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist who created Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

According to Maslow, a ‘self-actualized’ individual has…

– Clear insights into the nature of reality

– Accepted themselves and the world around them,

– Focus on problems outside themselves

– Thoughts and beliefs not confined by social conventions.

Maslow coined this term after studying individuals like Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau.

So, how do psychedelics lead to accelerated development towards self-actualization?

One of the benefits to psychedelics is their ability to enable the user to see things as they are, rather than how they wish things were.

In short, psychedelics break down the ego, enabling individuals to see the truth of reality since psychedelics eliminate their subconscious protections.

The best example I can give is myself. As an ambitious individual, I always look for ways to improve my quality of life. At a younger age, many of my psychedelic trips focused on self-improvement because of my slight obsession with personal development in my normal day-to-day life.

My entire psychedelic experience was viewed through the lens of, ‘How can I improve my life?’ Because of a psychedelic’s ability to disintegrate the ego, I gained clear insights into the eventual answer.

We wrote more about this in our piece, “Psychedelics and Self-Actualization”

“One of the benefits to psychedelics is their ability to enable the user to see things as they are, rather than how they wish things were.”

MORE TO COME

As mentioned throughout this article, this is only the first piece in our new series ‘Why Should You Take a Psychedelic?”

Over the following months, we will publish extensive articles on each of the four points above.

Once we finish each article, we will link back to them from this article.