How Ketamine Works to Help Us Heal: 3 Ways

How Ketamine Works: The Molecule/Medicine

When administered with a somewhat intensive protocol over several weeks, ketamine helps manage depression and anxiety symptoms. This is true even for people with chronic mood disorders never significantly alleviated by other anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication. This benefit can be accessed even if the medication is taken at a low dosage that does not induce a psychedelic state.

How Ketamine Works: The Trip

Another way ketamine helps with a range of issues is making use of the trip itself to do pieces of therapy work. The medicine facilitates lucid contact with unconscious materiel. If you have themes you are working on, places you feel you are stuck or confused, questions you have for your unconscious, you can prepare yourself for medicine sessions, try to give yourself some internal focus, and then do journaling and therapy integration work to unpack the material in the trip to move your issues forward.

During the trip, you have novel neural pathways providing you with new, original thoughts not burdened by your default mode processing of material. To make good use of this component it is best practice to be in a active therapy process or some other super-focused activity. This is so you might enter each medicine journey well prepared and be ready to integrate the material you encounter after the session(s).

Some people have what they describe as mystical/spiritual experiences that give them a radically different perspective on themselves, others, and life itself. Many of us have very narrow world/self/other views that do much to dictate our experience. Psychedelic experiences can often open a totally new understanding.

How Ketamine Works: Neuroplasticity

The third way ketamine helps is that in the days following a session your mind has serious neuroplasticity. What this means is it is easier for new synaptic connections to be established. It is less likely that your thoughts/feelings/behaviors will be forced into the same well worn groves in your mind that have you stuck in repetition. During the days following treatments it is important to do lots of journaling, therapy, art, conversations with friends, meditation, walks in the woods, and any new behaviors/thoughts/patterns you hope to establish.