What Mushrooms Teach the Brain About Safety
By Liddya Plenis — Journalist & Psychedelic Integration Coach
When Emotions Felt Like Natural Disasters
For most of my life, my emotions felt like weather I had to survive.
They didn’t arrive as whispers — they crashed, sudden and overwhelming, flooding my body before my mind could even name them. Panic would strike like lightning. Rage would rise like a flash fire. Shame would seep in like black ink, staining everything.
I could watch it happening from the outside — my breath going shallow, my chest tightening, my thoughts spinning so fast they blurred. But I couldn’t stop it. Once an emotion grabbed hold of me, it felt like I had no choice but to become it.
What made it even harder was the shame that came afterward.
People saw me as composed, articulate, resilient. They didn’t see how easily I could get hijacked from the inside. How I’d spend hours after an emotional wave dissecting what went wrong, promising to be more rational, more self-controlled next time — and still, when the next storm hit, I’d drown all over again.
I thought I had a self-control problem.
But what I really had was a nervous system that no longer felt safe.
When Controlling My Feelings Stopped Working
I built entire systems around controlling my emotions.
At first, it didn’t feel like control — it felt like discipline. Like strength.
I worked harder. Perfected more. I built rigid routines around myself like scaffolding, hoping that if I could stay structured enough, tidy enough, busy enough, I could keep my inner world from leaking out. Whenever a feeling rose too high, I slammed the lid shut. I shoved it down or split off from it completely, like stepping out of my body to watch from a safe distance.
And for a while, it worked — or at least, it looked like it was working. I was functional. Productive. Impressive. People called me resilient, organized, unstoppable. No one saw the white-knuckled grip it took to keep myself contained.
But control is a fragile religion. Eventually, my systems cracked.
The productivity stopped masking the burnout. The numbness stopped protecting me from pain and started cutting me off from everything — joy, wonder, love. It was like living in grayscale. I could still perform the motions of being alive, but I couldn’t feel it.
And when the walls finally collapsed, they collapsed all at once. The emotions I had held back for years didn’t trickle out — they flooded, all at once, like a dam breaking. I couldn’t hold them anymore. I couldn’t outwork them or outthink them.
All that was left was what I had been running from all along:
the raw, chaotic, unregulated weather of my emotional body.
That was when I reached for microdosing.
Not as a miracle. Not as an escape.
Just as a quiet question:
Could this teach my brain how to feel safe enough to feel again?
🧠 How the Brain Handles Emotion
What I learned next changed everything:
emotional regulation isn’t about discipline — it’s about safety.
The brain has a few key players in the emotional orchestra. The amygdala is the watchtower — it scans constantly for threat, real or imagined, and hits the alarm the second it senses danger. The prefrontal cortex is the conductor — it steps in to soothe, bring perspective, reason, and reframe. But here’s the catch: it only works if the amygdala isn’t blaring at full volume.
And the vagus nerve is like the grounding bass line beneath it all — it runs through the body, telling the heart, lungs, and gut that it’s safe to slow down, to return to rest-and-digest.
When trauma or chronic stress are present, this whole orchestra gets thrown out of tune. The amygdala becomes overactive, screaming false alarms at everything. The prefrontal cortex goes offline, too flooded to regulate. The vagus nerve never sends the “all clear,” so the body forgets how to come down.
This is what dysregulation really is:
not weakness, not a personality flaw — but a survival system stuck in overdrive.
You can’t logic your way out of it.
You can’t journal or affirm or hustle your way through it.
Because logic speaks to the mind,
and safety speaks to the body.
🍄 How Microdosing Helps Repattern the Nervous System
When I first began microdosing, I didn’t expect it to change anything.
I wasn’t chasing bliss or trying to escape my feelings — I just wanted to stop being ruled by them. I wanted to know if it was possible to feel something without it consuming me.
What surprised me wasn’t that the emotions disappeared.
It was that, for the first time, they didn’t scare me.
Low doses of psilocybin have been shown to reduce amygdala reactivity, meaning the brain’s threat detector stops screaming quite so loudly. At the same time, they enhance prefrontal cortex connectivity, which helps bring reason, perspective, and self-soothing back online. And crucially, they also increase BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) — a growth protein that fuels neuroplasticity, allowing new pathways for emotional regulation to form.
It’s like creating a temporary window of plasticity in the brain — a moment where the old fear-based wiring loosens just enough for new patterns to take root.
The experience wasn’t dramatic. There were no fireworks.
It was quiet. Subtle.
A familiar trigger would appear — a sharp tone from someone I loved, an unexpected change of plans — and instead of my body igniting like dry kindling, there was space. I could feel my heart race, yes, but I could also feel my feet on the ground. I could notice my breath. I could choose how to respond.
Before, my nervous system would go from zero to wildfire in a split second.
Now, there was a pause.
That pause changed everything.
It was the difference between drowning in a wave and riding it.
Microdosing didn’t make me emotionally “calm.”
It made me capable — of staying present inside my feelings without being swallowed by them.
It showed my brain something it had never known before:
that emotions weren’t danger signals to survive —
they were sensations to move through.
The Emotional Pain of Dysregulation
Before microdosing, my emotional life felt like living inside a fault line — always braced for the next quake.
I could be fine one moment and shattered the next, my body hijacked before my mind could catch up. A look, a tone, an unexpected change of plans — and suddenly my heart would be pounding, my chest tight, my vision narrowing like a tunnel. Logic never got a chance to speak. I was already gone, swallowed whole.
It was exhausting to live this way. I never trusted myself. I tiptoed through my days like they were made of glass, trying to anticipate which moment would crack me. I was either numb or flooded — either hovering somewhere above my body, detached and robotic, or drowning in feelings so big they erased me. There was no middle ground, no gentle place to land.
What made it harder was how invisible it all was. On the outside, I seemed composed. People called me grounded, capable, even unflappable. Inside, I was chaos. A storm behind my ribs. I would smile through conversations while secretly clenching my fists under the table just to stay tethered. I would excuse myself to the bathroom just to shake, breathe, cry, hide.
And then came the shame.
The shame was worse than the emotions themselves.
Because once the wave passed, I’d replay every reaction like a crime scene — interrogating myself, swearing I’d be better next time. I called myself dramatic, unstable, broken. I thought my sensitivity was proof that I was fundamentally flawed, that I was someone to be managed, not trusted.
But what I didn’t understand then — what I know now — is that this wasn’t weakness.
It wasn’t a failure of willpower or character.
It was simply a nervous system that had forgotten what safety felt like.
And when your body doesn’t feel safe, even love can feel like threat.
That’s the heartbreak of dysregulation:
it convinces you that you’re too much,
when really, you’ve just been carrying too much alone.
Practicing Safety While Microdosing
Microdosing didn’t magically regulate my emotions.
What it gave me was a window of softness — and I had to learn how to fill that window with safety, or it would close before anything new could grow.
In the beginning, my body didn’t trust calm. The moment things got quiet, my nervous system panicked, waiting for the next blow. So on microdosing days, when the edges of fear softened just slightly, I used that opening to teach my body what safety felt like.
I started with somatic grounding. Long, slow exhales that signalled to my vagus nerve: we’re safe now. I’d wrap myself in a blanket like a cocoon, or place one hand on my heart and one on my belly to anchor my awareness in my body. Sometimes I shook — literally shaking tension out of my limbs like an animal coming out of freeze. It felt strange at first, but my body understood what my mind never could: release is regulation.
I practiced naming my emotions in real time, which sounds simple but felt revolutionary. “I feel fear.” “I feel shame.” “I feel grief.” Speaking them out loud moved them from the amygdala — where they lived as threat — to the prefrontal cortex, where they became something I could hold. Naming gave shape to what had once been formless storms.
And sometimes, I didn’t try to regulate alone. I practiced co-regulation — letting someone I trusted sit with me while I cried or trembled or simply breathed. Borrowing their calm until mine returned. Learning that being held is not weakness, it’s how our nervous systems are designed to heal.
Over time, these practices became anchors. Microdosing opened the space, and these rituals wove safety into it. I stopped seeing emotions as fires to put out, and started seeing them as waves to ride.
The storms didn’t stop coming.
They just stopped capsizing me.
From Emotional Survival to Emotional Trust
Somewhere along the way, without fanfare or milestones, something in me quietly changed.
I stopped treating my emotions like enemies to outsmart.
I started treating them like visitors — not always welcome, not always comfortable, but never dangerous.
Before microdosing, every feeling felt like an emergency. Fear meant something was about to collapse. Sadness meant I was broken. Anger meant I had failed at being “spiritual.” My nervous system reacted to every inner shift like it was a fire to contain.
But as the weeks passed — microdosing gently opening space, and my safety practices stitching new patterns into that space — a new kind of relationship began to form. Emotions stopped arriving as explosions. They came like waves: powerful, but temporary. I could feel them move through me instead of detonating inside me.
And with that came something I had never felt before: trust.
Not trust that I would always be calm — but trust that I could survive not being calm.
Trust that I could let myself feel something without being consumed by it.
Trust that no matter what rose in me, I wouldn’t abandon myself this time.
It was disorienting at first, this softness. I had spent so many years surviving my emotions that I didn’t know who I was without the battle. But slowly, I began to realise: this was who I had been trying to reach all along. The version of me who didn’t need to control every wave — because she knew she could float.
That, to me, is the heart of emotional regulation.
Not control. Not composure.
Trust.
Microdosing didn’t make me fearless.
It made me safe enough to feel everything — and stay.
