The Brain’s Gift During Microdosing
By Liddya Plenis — Journalist & Psychedelic Integration Coach
The Paradox of Knowing Who You Want to Be
For years, I knew exactly who I wanted to be. She lived in the back of my mind like a ghost I couldn’t touch — calm, steady, creative, spacious. She woke slowly, wrote daily, spoke with softness and fire. She moved through the world like her nervous system trusted it. And every morning I woke up as someone else entirely. My body was tense before I opened my eyes. My mind sprinted ahead of me like it was late for something. I would sit at my desk and watch my hands hover above the keyboard, frozen while my thoughts raced.
That dissonance was its own kind of grief. There’s a special pain in seeing your potential so clearly and still feeling chained to the version of you who keeps sabotaging it. It’s like watching your future call to you from the shoreline while your feet stay stuck in cement. I kept thinking maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. So I pushed harder. New planners, new meditation apps, new Monday-morning promises. I built vision boards. I declared “fresh starts” like battle cries. And still — the old loops won. The part of me that wanted to change was always outpaced by the part of me that had memorised how to stay small.
Living in a Brain That Forgot How to Change
At some point the stuckness stopped being frustrating and started to feel humiliating. I knew better, yet I couldn’t do better. Nights became the worst. I would lie awake at 3am, staring into the dark, replaying the same failures in my head like a cruel highlight reel. In the daylight I could disguise it — smile on calls, deliver on deadlines — but at night the truth leaked through: my life was built from reflexes I couldn’t override.
I kept trying to fix it with more logic. I read mindset books like they were sacred texts. I journaled affirmations I didn’t believe. I built meticulous morning routines so rigid they bordered on punishment. Nothing worked. The loop was faster than thought. I wasn’t lazy. I wasn’t weak. My brain had just forgotten how to let go.
Burnout didn’t hit me like an explosion. It came like fog — quiet and heavy. One day I simply stopped being able to pretend. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t answer texts. I couldn’t summon the performance anymore. I was hollow.
And in that hollow space, I finally did something radical: I stopped trying to crush the old patterns — and tried something that might let me grow out of them instead. I began microdosing.
What Neuroplasticity Really Means
Before microdosing, I thought change was just willpower. I didn’t understand that change is also biology.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire itself — to prune old connections and form new ones. When you learn something new, practise a skill, or form a habit, you’re literally sculpting the architecture of your mind. But trauma, chronic stress, and repetition can narrow this ability. They make the brain rigid. Familiar patterns get reinforced not because they’re good, but because they’re known. Over time, the brain confuses “known” with “safe,” and begins defending the cage as if it were home.
This is why stuckness isn’t laziness — it’s neurological inertia.
The brain can change, but it has to remember how.
How Microdosing Sparks Neuroplasticity
Microdosing gave my brain that reminder.
Low doses of psilocybin and LSD have been shown to increase BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a protein that helps neurons grow new connections. They also quiet the Default Mode Network (DMN) — the brain’s self-referential narrator — which is often overactive in anxiety, depression, and rumination.
It’s like opening windows in a dusty house. The light can finally reach corners that have been dark for years.
I didn’t feel euphoric. I didn’t become fearless. What I felt was space — a subtle slowing-down of my automatic reactions, a thin crack of light between the thought and the reflex. In that crack, choice returned. The old loops were still there, but they had lost their grip. The clay was soft again.
Why It’s So Hard to Become Who You Want to Be
This is what no one tells you: becoming the person you want to be will hurt at first. Not because you’re doing it wrong — but because becoming means leaving behind everything your body once called safety.
Your nervous system doesn’t just remember the past. It keeps choosing it. It doesn’t care if those patterns make you happy; it only cares that they kept you alive. And so, even as your dreams whisper new directions, your body pulls you back like gravity. You watch yourself repeat the same old choreography: hovering over the “send” button and closing the draft instead, smiling and nodding when you want to say no, rearranging your workspace for the tenth time instead of writing the thing that scares you.
It’s maddening — to want something new with your whole being and still watch your hands carry out the old rituals. It can make you feel broken, weak, defective. I used to berate myself for it. You know better, I’d hiss inside. Why can’t you do better? But it wasn’t a lack of willpower. It was old architecture.
Identity isn’t just an idea. It’s a web of neural loops — electrical patterns carved through years of repetition. The brain clings to them because they are familiar, and familiar equals safe. It doesn’t care if they suffocate you. It will keep rebuilding the same self like muscle memory, even as your future self stands just a few steps away begging you to reach her.
This is the heartbreak no one warns you about: you can see who you could be so clearly… and still not know how to reach her. And every failed attempt deepens the ache. You start to wonder if she was ever real, or just a mirage you invented to torture yourself with.
That’s what made microdosing so powerful. It didn’t erase the old identity overnight — that would’ve been too much for my nervous system to tolerate. Instead, it softened the edges. It made the old loops slightly less sticky. It gave my brain a brief moment of quiet, just long enough to consider the possibility of another self.
It didn’t hand me a new identity. It handed me permission to imagine one.
And that, in the beginning, was everything.
Pairing Neuroplasticity With Intentional Practice
Here’s the part people miss: neuroplasticity is only potential. It’s not change on its own — it’s a doorway, and doorways don’t walk you through themselves. You have to give your rewired brain something new to build, something to shape that newfound openness around. Otherwise, it will default back to the grooves it already knows.
While I was microdosing, I treated my days like soft clay — knowing it would harden again, knowing I had to leave impressions while it was still malleable. I journaled each morning before my thoughts could race ahead of me, before the old identity could slip her hands back on the wheel. It wasn’t pretty or structured; sometimes it was just three shaky sentences about how I wanted to feel that day. I paired breathwork with new self-talk, breathing in words like “soft,” “spacious,” “safe” — and breathing out the sentences that had calcified in my bones.
I moved my body too, not to sculpt it or prove anything, but to shake loose the fear where it lived inside my muscles. Sometimes it was wild dancing in my kitchen, sometimes just lying on the floor and letting my body tremble. That movement felt like clearing cobwebs, like telling my nervous system: you’re allowed to be here now. I created tiny experiments — speaking up when I usually stayed silent, letting an email be imperfect, working for thirty minutes without the armour of perfectionism.
These practices were not glamorous. They were awkward, clumsy, often invisible. But they mattered more than anything. The microdose opened the window. These rituals planted the seeds.
And slowly, new pathways began to grow. Thoughts became different choices. Choices became different behaviours. Behaviours became identity — not all at once, but molecule by molecule. That’s the secret of becoming: it never feels big while it’s happening. It only looks like transformation in hindsight.
The Identity Shift in Real Life
Becoming who you want to be is not glamorous. It’s awkward, quiet, and deeply vulnerable.
There were days I felt like an impostor in my own skin — walking through my life as if I were wearing someone else’s body. I would show up as the version of me I wanted to be — calm, focused, expressive — while the old self howled just under the surface, desperate to drag me back. Sometimes she did. There were days I collapsed right back into the old loops, binge-scrolling or abandoning my work, then spiraling in shame.
But I kept going. Not pushing — repeating. Choosing again. Watering the new pathways until they could hold my weight. Each small choice laid another thread in the scaffolding of who I was becoming. And for the longest time, it didn’t look like it was working. That’s the cruel trick of identity change: it’s invisible from the inside. You only notice it when you suddenly realise you’re not pretending anymore.
Eventually, something shifted almost imperceptibly. I stopped “trying to be her.” I just was her, quietly, without announcement. The things that once required willpower had become reflexes. My nervous system finally recognised this new version of me as safe — and once it did, everything got lighter.
That is the real gift of neuroplasticity during microdosing.
It’s not about becoming someone else.
It’s about finally becoming available to yourself.
If You Feel Stuck
If you feel stuck, please don’t try to leap. Try softening.
Microdosing won’t do the work for you — but it will make the work land. It will make your mind a less hostile place for newness. It will let you build the person you want to be not by force, but by trust.
Start small. Plant one new thought. One small habit. One breath of space between the loop and your choice. That’s all it takes to begin. You don’t have to overhaul your life overnight. You just have to create enough safety for your brain to believe that change is possible.
Let that be enough for today.
Because it is.
Neuroplasticity is your brain’s love letter to your future self.
And every single day you practice, it writes back.
