Getting Unstuck: How Psychedelics Can Help Navigate Mental Blocks 🧠

Feeling stuck? Here's how psychedelics may help free latent creativity and uncover novel solutions to complex problems.

As a creative, I run into mental blocks often.

The bane of writers is the dreaded “blank page syndrome.” Even when I know exactly what I’m writing about, getting any words on the page can be a slog.

The blank page weighs especially heavy as I inch closer and closer to looming deadlines.

Other professions experience mental blocks, too — coders run into algorithmic challenges, business leaders have to solve issues related to strategy or team dynamics, and scientists need to answer complex research questions.

All forms of mental blocks require us to tap into creativity to solve them.

Psychedelics are powerful tools for catalyzing creative flow states and outside-the-box thinking — thus improving the chances of finding a novel solution, a groundbreaking new idea, or the elusive plot twist you’ve been searching for.

Here’s how psychedelics can change the way we think, increase creative mental “entropy,” and help us solve challenging problems.

Before I dig into what psychedelics can do, let’s first examine what they can’t do.

Psychedelics will not make us smarter, and they don’t increase our IQ.

You can’t take psychedelics and suddenly understand quantum mechanics. However, if you already understand quantum mechanics and then take psychedelics, they can help you gain a much deeper understanding and draw connections between disparate ideas floating around in the neural jelly filling the inside of your skull.

Classic psychedelics, by and large, work by increasing “randomness” or “chaos” in the brain.

This concept is the crux of the problem-solving and creativity-inducing benefits of these compounds.

Basically, more randomness = more chances of discovering new ideas.

Problem-solving and artistic expression are both forms of creativity. They are dynamic processes that require a shift between different modes of thought to reach the end result. The more randomness there is, the more likely we are to find a novel solution to our problem or a fresh perspective to our artistic endeavors.

Psychedelics don’t provide you with new insight or information, but they can help us view a problem you’ve been working on from different angles. Every once in a while, one of these new ideas yields an “aha!” moment, and the mental block is cleared.