Making Mental Space for New Possibilities
By Liddya Plenis — Journalist & Psychedelic Integration Coach
I used to think stillness meant something was wrong.
If I ever stopped moving, even for a moment, my mind would revolt. Any attempt to rest — to meditate, to simply sit on the floor and breathe — triggered an avalanche. It was like opening the floodgates on a dam I didn’t know I’d been holding shut. Thoughts came pouring in at once: unfinished tasks, imaginary disasters, old mistakes I couldn’t undo no matter how many times I replayed them. My brain didn’t just think; it swarmed. It buzzed and ricocheted, like a jar full of bees I couldn’t open and couldn’t silence.
What made it so disorienting was how invisible it was. On the outside, I looked calm, even impressive — focused, ambitious, relentlessly productive. People praised me for being “disciplined.” They didn’t see the chaos underneath. They didn’t see that I could barely hear my own thoughts beneath the noise, that my nervous system was clenched so tightly even silence felt hostile.
Stillness wasn’t soothing back then. It was terrifying.
Because when the external noise stopped, I had to face the internal kind.
And I remember thinking, not for the first time: What if this isn’t clarity? What if this voice that sounds like truth is just… stuck?
Living Inside a Crowded Mind
Back then, living inside my own mind felt like living in a room that was always too bright and too loud.
Whenever I tried to slow down — to breathe, to notice the present moment, to meditate like every wellness app told me to — my brain would revolt. Stillness became a trigger. The moment I sat still, the noise swelled, as if it had been waiting for silence to finally take the stage. I’d close my eyes and be ambushed by thought avalanches: endless to-do lists, worst-case scenarios, ancient regrets I couldn’t undo but kept rehearsing like lines in a play.
It wasn’t just thinking. It was spinning. A relentless, mechanical hum that didn’t stop even when I slept — it only disguised itself as dreams about missing flights, losing teeth, disappointing everyone.
What made it especially cruel was how invisible it was. From the outside, I looked fine — even impressive. Focused. High-functioning. No one knew that while I was calmly answering emails, I was also simultaneously rewriting conversations from three years ago and forecasting ten different disasters for next Tuesday.
I felt split in two: the person who appeared composed, and the person silently drowning behind her forehead.
And because I didn’t have language for what was happening, I assumed it meant something was wrong with me. I thought my inability to find stillness meant I was weak, broken, undisciplined. I told myself I just needed to try harder, meditate longer, hustle my way into peace.
But no amount of willpower could touch it — because this wasn’t about will.
It was about being trapped inside an overactive system that no longer knew how to rest.
Understanding the Default Mode Network
The first time I heard the term Default Mode Network, I almost laughed. It sounded like something out of a sci-fi script — sterile, robotic, irrelevant to the emotional chaos of my actual life. But when I began digging into the research, something inside me went still. For the first time, my inner world had a name.
The Default Mode Network, or DMN, is the part of the brain that builds your sense of self. It’s the narrator behind the curtain, stitching your life into a coherent story: who you are, where you’ve been, what others think of you, what might happen next. It drifts into the past, replays old conversations, projects into the future, rehearses what could go wrong. It is the mind’s personal historian and fortune teller rolled into one.
This system is what allows us to have a continuous identity. It’s what lets you wake up each morning as “you.” But like any system built for survival, it can turn against you when left unchecked. When the DMN becomes overactive, it stops telling stories and starts building cages. It loops familiar patterns over and over, even if they hurt you. It whispers criticisms until they feel like facts. It spins worries into certainties. It replays regrets like lullabies that never let you sleep.
And because it speaks in your own voice, you believe it. You start mistaking its commentary for truth.
Realising this changed everything for me. My racing mind wasn’t evidence that I was broken or weak — it was evidence that my DMN had become hyperactive, stuck on repeat. I wasn’t failing at stillness. I was just trying to meditate inside a mental engine that had forgotten how to idle.
How Microdosing Calms the DMN
The first time I felt my mind go quiet, it startled me.
I had expected fireworks — a psychedelic spectacle, a cinematic surge of colour. But microdosing arrived like a hush. Not empty, not numb — just quiet in a way that felt impossibly foreign. It was like someone had finally turned down a blaring radio I hadn’t realised was on full volume. The noise didn’t vanish all at once; it simply softened, receded, blurred at the edges until I could finally hear the world underneath it.
What I was feeling had a name: the Default Mode Network (DMN) gently relaxing its grip.
Low doses of psilocybin have been shown to decrease DMN activity — the same network that had been running my self-critical monologue like a 24/7 broadcast. At the same time, microdosing increases connectivity between brain regions that rarely talk to each other when the DMN dominates. It also boosts BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a growth protein that helps neurons form new connections, giving the brain a kind of plasticity it forgets in states of chronic stress.
It’s not a flood of visions. It’s not “ego death.” It’s more like watching the iron bars of your thoughts slowly rust and bend.
For years, my thinking had marched in tight, predictable loops — well-worn grooves carved by anxiety, perfectionism, and trauma. Microdosing loosened them, just slightly, like sunlight softening frozen ground. My thoughts began to wander again. Not race — wander. They meandered down side paths, collided in strange combinations, made metaphors out of nothing.
It felt less like inventing new thoughts and more like remembering how to let them arrive.
That’s the part no one talks about: microdosing didn’t silence my mind. It made space inside it — space where curiosity could breathe, where creativity could land, where the old stories could lose their gravity.
And in that space, for the first time, I met a version of myself I hadn’t heard in years: the one who wasn’t trying to prove anything. The one who was simply present.
The Emotional Cost of Constant Noise
Before I found that quiet, I hadn’t realised how much the constant mental noise was costing me — not just cognitively, but emotionally, spiritually, physically.
It stole my presence. Even in moments that should have felt safe — laughing with friends, watching the ocean, lying in bed beside someone I loved — part of me was already elsewhere, sprinting through imaginary futures or rearranging the past. I was never truly where I was. It felt like living one step removed from my own life, watching it from behind glass while my brain narrated over it like a sports commentator who couldn’t turn off the mic.
It wore down my body. My nervous system was locked in overdrive for so long that I forgot what relaxed even felt like. My jaw ached from clenching. My breath stayed shallow, my chest tight, my sleep fractured. Even joy felt dangerous, because if I let myself soften, what if everything collapsed? I lived like a soldier stationed in my own mind — always scanning, always braced, never allowed to stand down.
And it made me profoundly lonely. Because when your mind is that loud, nothing can reach you. Conversations become performances. Beauty becomes background noise. You start missing your own life while it’s happening.
This wasn’t weakness. It wasn’t a flaw. It was what happens when the Default Mode Network stays stuck in overdrive, fuelled by years of overstimulation, perfectionism, and survival-mode living. My mind thought it was protecting me. It didn’t know it was keeping me from myself.
That’s why the first taste of quiet felt so shocking — not because it was dramatic, but because it revealed just how long I had been holding my breath.
What Happens When the DMN Quiets
The first time my mind truly went quiet, it didn’t feel like enlightenment.
It felt like exhaling after years of holding my breath.
There were no visions, no colours, no cosmic revelations. Just… space. Spaciousness where there had only ever been static. It was as if someone had opened every window inside my head and let fresh air pour through the halls. Thoughts were still there, but they no longer crowded each other — they drifted slowly, like clouds. For once, they weren’t shouting. They were just passing by.
What startled me most was how safe it felt. I hadn’t realised until that moment how much tension had been braided into every thought I had. Normally, thinking felt like bracing. My mind raced ahead, always trying to stay one step in front of disaster. But now, for the first time in years, my nervous system stopped flinching at the future. There was no urgency. No script to rehearse. Just presence.
And that presence changed everything.
Colours seemed brighter. Sounds landed deeper. When someone spoke to me, I didn’t rehearse my response — I actually heard them. Even my emotions began to move differently. They no longer crashed over me like waves; they moved through like weather — rising, peaking, passing.
That’s what happens when the Default Mode Network finally loosens its grip: the mental noise softens enough that life can actually get in.
Quieting the DMN didn’t make me empty.
It made me receptive.
It gave me the mental space to notice what I wanted, not just what I feared. To follow curiosity without the constant drag of self-commentary. To see possibilities I couldn’t see while my mind was barricaded in its own noise.
It was like remembering a language I had once spoken fluently but somehow forgotten — the language of simply being.
Practices That Support the Quiet
Microdosing opened the door to stillness, but I had to teach my body how to stay inside it. At first, the silence felt fragile, like a soap bubble that might pop if I moved too fast. My nervous system was so conditioned to sprint that any pause made it panic — as if stopping meant danger. So I began to build rituals around the quiet, little containers to remind my mind that it was safe to soften.
I started with slow, phone-free walks, not for steps or productivity, but for noticing. I walked like someone who had just landed on Earth — studying the way sunlight hit cracked pavement, the rhythm of strangers’ footsteps, the quiet choreography of tree branches. These walks rewired something in me. They reminded my brain that the world continues even when I’m not managing it, and that beauty doesn’t need my control to exist.
I wove in somatic grounding too — long exhalations, cold water on my wrists, stretching my spine like I was wringing the tension out of it. I stopped demanding my body “relax” and started coaxing it, gently, like you would soothe a scared animal. I learned that silence doesn’t come from suppressing the noise; it comes from helping your nervous system feel safe enough to release its grip.
And I began carving out “blank space” time in my calendar: small pockets of unclaimed hours with no goal, no screen, no expectation to produce anything. At first, these hours felt unbearable — my DMN would roar back to life, trying to fill the void with old loops. But over time, that urgency faded. The blankness became breathable.
These rituals didn’t silence my mind. They made space around it. They helped me understand that stillness isn’t the absence of thought — it’s the presence of choice about which thoughts to follow, and which to simply let drift past like birds across an open sky.
When the Mind Finally Lets Go
The first time I truly experienced quiet, I didn’t trust it.
It felt too open, too spacious — like walking through an empty house after years of living in a crowded one. My mind, so used to filling every silence with analysis and warning bells, didn’t know what to do with stillness.
But then something extraordinary happened in that emptiness:
I began to feel.
Not the frantic feelings that come wrapped in panic, but the subtle kind — the warmth of sunlight on my skin, the small ache of joy in my chest, the pulse of my own breath. Life hadn’t been missing. I had just been too loud inside to hear it.
That’s the quiet that comes when the Default Mode Network finally softens:
not blankness, not numbness — spaciousness.
Space for curiosity.
Space for creativity.
Space for the version of you who isn’t braced for impact, who is simply here.
So if your mind won’t stop spinning, don’t try to silence it by force.
Just give it a little room to breathe.
Pair a gentle microdose with stillness. Step outside. Lie on the floor. Close your eyes and let the commentary blur.
Because a quiet mind isn’t the end of thinking.
It’s the beginning of everything else.
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Liddya Plenis is a journalist and psychedelic integration coach. She helps seekers untangle their minds and make space for who they’re becoming.
