Intro psychedelics aging
What are psychedelics?
Psychedelic drugs, or hallucinogens, are a class of substances which contain compounds that can alter perception. They are also commonly referred to as “entheogens”, although that term is now more frequently associated with hallucinogenic plants. Regardless, the word entheogen is Greek in origin and can be roughly translated to mean “building the God within”, and the high produced by these drugs (known as a “trip”) can be very spiritual and mind-expanding in nature. Psychedelic trips include various types of visual, auditory, and sensory hallucinations.
Psychedelics can be naturally-derived like psilocybin, or manmade like ketamine. Both natural and synthetic hallucinogens are generally regarded as safe. According to the results of a Global Drug Survey that polled 120,000 regular drug users, magic mushrooms were the safest recreational drug, along with cannabis. Their method of determining user safety was by comparing the drug used to the amount of required emergency room visits. Only 0.2% of the nearly 10,000 mushroom users surveyed had ever required emergency care, compared to the 1.0% of those using harder drugs like ecstasy or cocaine.
Furthermore, a growing body of research has found that certain psychedelic substances can help relieve anxiety, depression, PTSD, addiction and numerous other mental health disorders. “The biggest misconception people have about psychedelics is that these are drugs that make you crazy,” says Michael Pollan, author of the new book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. “We now have evidence that that does happen sometimes — but in many more cases, these are drugs that can make you sane.”
The fear of aging
Although it may sound a bit crazy, after all, everything ages – the fear of aging is actually quite common. So much so, that it even has its own acronym, FOGO, or “Fear of Getting Old.” A survey commissioned by the drug company Pfizer, found that 87 percent of participants had at least one fear about getting old. And to make things more interesting, Pfizer also commissioned a study to analyze how aging was being discussed on social media, and how it exacerbated FOGO. They found, unsurprisingly, that “the majority – 62 percent – of the 4.2 million Tweets posted about aging in the last 12 months were negative.”
Aside from “FOGO”, which is more of a casual term, there are a couple of medical word for this fear as well – gerontophobia or gerascophobia. These terms refer to the fear of aging, losing one’s youth, and becoming less independent with a diminished ability to care for oneself. A phobia is an extreme and often irrational fear or aversion to something, and there are over 500 recognized phobias such as arachnophobia (fear of spiders), claustrophobia (fear of confined spaces), and achluophobia (fear of the dark).
Most experts agree that the root cause for gerontophobia, or any phobia really, is anxiety. While some phobias may be triggered by experiences (PTSD), people who develop phobias generally tend to be more anxious or high-strung. Another common issue can be an underlying health condition such as hormonal imbalances, adrenal insufficiency, thyroid-related problems, etc.
Many things in life can cause a condition like gerontophobia to worsen or spiral out of control. It should come as no surprise that our addiction to social media and the way society views and treats the elderly is causing gerontophobia to intensify in people who already have it, and it’s leading to individuals who are developing this fear at much younger ages. Social media reinforces and promotes many ideas that could lead one to believe that reaching a certain age is basically the end of the line. Negative messaging about aging in the media, age-based prejudice in the workplace and advertising, and pressure from the cosmetic industry all run rampant on social media.
For example, healthcare professionals have been expressing concerns about how children as young as thirteen, most of whom were accompanied by a guardian of legal age, were coming in to request facial fillers, rhinoplasties, and preventative botox. Doctors suspect “selfie culture” and apps such as Facetune and others that allow users to seamlessly edit their photos and subsequently create an idealized and false reality for their followers, are partially responsible for the uptick.
The comparative nature of social media, paired with the need to feel like we have achieved something by a certain age, doesn’t help when we get to feeling like our biological clocks are ticking away. According to a survey conducted by the nonprofit organization Flawless, roughly 60 percent of young adults (ages 18 to 30), believe that social media has “contributed to them feeling paranoid about aging”.
Jaime Osnato, a writer for Livestrong.com, stated that “negative perceptions of aging are associated with a greater risk of depression and stress according to the RSPH.” Osnato explained that studies have shown that “an adverse view of aging can lead to high levels of body dissatisfaction and lower self-esteem in older people, especially females.” Lots of people even choose to undergo excessive amounts of cosmetic procedures to “fix” age-related changes in their bodies.
And don’t get me wrong, while I’m all for women doing what they want to feel like the best version of themselves, I just can’t get behind an industry that profits off of women’s insecurities and tries to make us feel like spending thousands of dollars to cut ourselves up and inject chemicals into our bodies is “self-care”. Eating right, exercising, protecting yourself from the sun, using high-quality skin and hair products, taking vitamins, drinking water… that’s what self-care is; engaging in activities that will allow you to live longer and be independent for as long as possible. If you’re getting cosmetic work but still living an unhealthy lifestyle, you’re doing absolutely nothing beneficial for yourself in the long run.
However, the fear of aging is not just rooted in the need to look young. On a deeper level, the older we look and feel, the more we have to face and come to terms with our own mortality. I used to work in a nursing home, and have also cared for elderly relatives, and the realization that death is getting closer as health problems arise and loved ones are lost, is one of the most difficult things the elderly face.
Psychedelics and longevity – preventing and reversing the aging process
While the FDA does not recognize aging as a disease, the fear of aging is quite clearly a classifiable mental health disorder, akin to many other phobias and forms of anxiety. Wellness, beauty, and several other types of health-related fields and industries are centered around anti-aging, and new studies are trying to determine what mechanisms lead to aging, and how it can be prevented or reversed.
For example, Dr. Andrew Steele, a physics professor from Oxford University who also majored in Biology, has spent much of his career thus far focusing on the complexity of aging. According to him, aging (not cancer or heart disease) is the leading cause of death and suffering in humans. He outlines in his book, Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, how we could live well past 200 years old if we develop certain pharmacological solutions that can eliminate the cells that degrade tissue function.
His theory is based on an international epigenetics study conducted by Harvard Medical School that demonstrated for the first time how “degradation of the DNA sequence (independent of changed to the genetic code itself)”, can propel aging in humans, or any living organism. Using mice, the Harvard researchers found that restoring the integrity of the epigenome successfully reversed those signs of aging in their subjects.
David Sinclair, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, stated that “the discovery supports the hypothesis that mammalian cells maintain a kind of backup copy of epigenetic software that, when accessed, can allow an aged, epigenetically scrambled cell to reboot into a youthful, healthy state.”
Now, researchers are looking at how psychedelics can be a part of the anti-aging movement. It was announced during a recent Wonderland conference in Florida that the Longevity Science Foundation (LSF), a nonprofit organization that funds different research projects to help increase human lifespans, will partner with PsyMed Ventures, a psychedelics industry investment firm, to explore how different compounds like ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin can be used to reverse the signs of physical and mental aging.
Psychedelic applications for mental health treatments are rapidly accelerating, according to the LSF, with compounds like ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin showing promising results in treating PTSD, depression, and addiction. Researchers also have proven ketamine and psilocybin can help regrow neural connections, a potentially groundbreaking finding in developing future treatments for aging-related neurodegenerative diseases, according to the LSF.
What explains the crossover of these two worlds? Longevity proponents I talked to offered a few explanations – most simply, that psychedelics could improve health or lifespan by alleviating the symptoms of mental illnesses. There are some early suggestions that psychedelics can have physical effects like reducing inflammation or increasing brain chemicals and connections, which might affect longevity too.
The two fields share analogous logistical and regulatory woes. Psychedelics are still mostly illegal, and the FDA doesn’t consider ageing a disease, so it’s difficult to design clinical trials to tackle a condition that isn’t recognized. Pharmaceutical and drug development in these areas therefore takes time and faces considerable hurdles. As a result, the market in both fields is growing around individual consumer goods, like supplements, nootropics or microdosing products. But their cultural commonalities might be the more interesting link.
Some think psychedelics show promise as treatment options for various mental health conditions. Others think they will have a larger sociocultural impact: as “cures” for mental illness, or a way to facilitate mediation in global conflict, or to alter people’s behaviors and attitudes regarding the climate crisis. Likewise, within longevity, some focus on developing tools to increase healthspan. Others think we can set our sights higher: lifespan, the actual number of years we are alive and even beating back death altogether by stopping or reversing the ageing process.
Final thoughts
What many of these different sectors have in common, is the element of mental health. Bottom line, no matter how beautiful, healthy, or youthful you may be, you won’t feel that way if you have mental health issues. Not to mention, stress and mental illness can trigger the release of numerous chemicals and hormones that are bad for the body and can actually age a person much faster. So it’s not just about feeling younger or older, poor mental health can truly change the rate at which a person’s body and mind ages.
While psychedelics alone are not the be-all, end-all solution to rapid aging, when combined with other lifestyle factors like healthy eating, good sleep patterns, regular exercise, engaging in fulfilling relationships, and so on, they can be that extra boost you need to take your mental health and wellbeing to the next level. Feeling not good, but great. Not well, but elevated.
Hello readers. We’re happy to have you with us at Cannadelics.com; a news source here to bring you the best in independent reporting for the growing cannabis and hallucinogen fields. Join us frequently to stay on top of everything, and subscribe to our Cannadelics Weekly Newsletter, for updates straight to your email. Check out some awesome promos for cannabis buds, smoking devices and equipment like vapes, edibles, cannabinoid compounds, amanita mushroom products, and a whole bunch more. Let’s all get stoned together!
