Magic Mushrooms: A Quick Guide

What Are Magic Mushrooms? What’s Psilocybin?

New to mushrooms? Well here’s a quick magic mushrooms guide to get you started. Humans have been using magic mushrooms since time immemorial. According to archeologists, the use of magic mushrooms predates modern recorded history. Be it Siberia, Central America, Africa or Australia, native peoples from around the world were already using magic mushrooms centuries before hieroglyphs were being carved into pyramids. Mushrooms were an integral component of religious ceremonies, and were used by shamans and healers for both psychological and physical therapy.

“Psilocybin” is the name given to the psychoactive compound that makes a magic mushroom trip so interesting and fun. It’s been described as a “gateway to enlightenment,” and the “great healer” and has been used for thousands of years by people seeking insight into their own emotions, habits and mental processes. Artists have used them to expand the bounds of their creative vision, engineers to see mechanical problems as a whole rather than in parts, scientists to solve complex equations and make breakthroughs in theory. Many report they use magic mushrooms to discover a better version of themselves…

…It’s even speculated that psilocybin use by early hominids may have accelerated human evolution.

Why do people use magic mushrooms?

No magic mushrooms guide is complete without mention of psilocybin, the active ingredient found in “magic mushrooms,” or “shrooms,” is a powerful psychedelic.

People in many cultures have used psilocybin for religious rituals, to spark creativity, for recreation and even as part of psychological/emotional therapy. The reasons people try psilocybin are varied, but for most, they use magic mushrooms to alter perception, thoughts, and feelings.

People have also used magic mushrooms to deal with stress, to try to achieve an enlightened state of mind, as an escape from life’s troubles, or simply to relieve boredom.

If you are interested in psychedelics, psilocybin is a great place to start. Although magic mushrooms are around 100 times less potent than LSD, they can alter your perception of space and time, as well as cause people to experience visual hallucinations, euphoria, and mystical experiences.

Researchers are now finding that microdosing magic mushrooms can decrease negative emotionality and dysfunctional attitudes while improving mood and focus.

People have started using magic mushrooms to overcome opioid, nicotine and alcohol addiction… With the use of therapeutic psychedelics they have gained perspective on their lives and remapped dysfunctional behavior. Potential therapeutic uses for magic mushrooms include depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, quitting smoking, alcohol addiction, cocaine addiction, cluster headaches, and cancer-related or other end-of-life psychological distress.

From treating depression to helping manage alcohol addiction, researchers say legal medical “magic mushrooms” have many potential benefits.

Used recreationally, magic mushrooms offer the possibility of a “trip” replete with stimulating visuals, altered consciousness, bouts of uncontrollable laughter, a sense of connectedness with nature, epiphanies and creative inspirations.

From treating depression to helping manage alcohol addiction, researchers say legal medical “magic mushrooms” have many potential benefits.

What is Microdosing?

Microdosing started out as a “productivity hack” in Silicon Valley among developers, engineers and others using them to make them more energized, focused, creative, and productive. As the name implies, microdosing is all about taking micro-sized doses of shrooms intermittently through the week.

The benefit of this approach is that you’ll get all the benefits of psilocybin for improving your mental acuity, creativity and emotional intelligence without any risk of a “bad trip” that sometimes occurs when people take large doses.

Microdosing psilocybin is rapidly increasing in popularity among professionals, college professors, doctors, scientists as increasing numbers of people seek to tap into psilocybin’s mental wellness benefits to improve their job performance and overall lives.