The blood vessel massage: Psilocybe mushrooms for microvascular health

When it comes to the Psilocybe mushroom experience, I’m going to quote someone who’s sadly no longer with us: “It’s like a massage for your brain.” This is my experience too, a combination of blood vessels constricting and dilating again in your brain and other organs, that releases tension in a pleasurable manner.

Serotonin is involved in making your blood vessels dilate and constrict, Psilocin from the Psilocybe mushrooms is very similar to Serotonin and hits most of the same receptors. And if you look at it in this manner, then you start to understand another strange observation: People who have had mushrooms at least once in their life have a lower blood pressure than those who haven’t.

If you’ve ever had psychedelics in your life, you have a reduced risk of diabetes and heart disease, with the link being strongest with the tryptamines (DMT + Psilocin). And why would that be? It seems to me that it’s down to the same underlying factors as the reduced risk of high blood pressure seen in those with any history of psychedelics, with the link again being most prominent for the tryptamines:

The pattern of vasoconstriction and vasodilation during the mushroom trip, while your blood pressure and heart rate are temporarily increased and inflammation is shut down, is like a massage from within your brain. We know that the body benefits from a massage. As an example, if you massage the skin of your scalp as a man, you remove the calcification of blood vessels and sebum buildup that prohibits your hair follicles from growing.

High blood pressure is the body’s response to decreased vascular health: It still needs to get oxygen and nutrients to all of your tissues, so the way to do it when the quality of your blood vessels is declining is to compensate by increasing the pressure. It’s a compensatory response that we see in most elderly people.

Rather than reducing blood pressure with medication, people would be better off trying to figure out how to address the decline in arterial stiffness, microvascular permeability and overall deterioration that forces the body to increase our blood pressure. It seems to me that one of the best ways we currently have available to achieve that, is through the help of our friend the Psilocybe mushroom.

Without adjusting for confounders, they found that those who had ever taken Psilocybe mushrooms have a 40% reduced risk of high blood pressure. And I know what you’re now thinking: “Well you’re supposed to adjust for confounders dude!” And I agree, I really wish they gave us data that was only adjusted for age. But look at that raw difference in hypertension for different types of psychedelics: Nothing significant for phenethylamines, some effect with LSD and then boom, 40% reduced risk for Mister Mushroom. It really suggests that the mushroom does something.

If you can prevent people from developing high blood pressure, that translates into all sorts of benefits in the form of reduced damage to the body and a decline in the speed of the aging process. We’re only really finding out what psychedelics can do for your body now, because we’re getting a better sample of users.

In the past, the guy taking mushrooms would be some rock musician who lives in hotels and also injects heroin, or hippies who travel around the world and live in vans. When relatively regular people take them, you become better able to compare them to the general population.

But the best evidence to me that your brain benefits from these mushrooms, is just my own experience in taking them. I take cannabis too often, but I take mushrooms not often enough. It really does feel like a massage within your brain, where all your blood vessels constrict and delay themselves, thereby generating internal pressures that forces a bunch of junk loose.

And I’m not just saying this for any reason, I’m saying this in light of the fact that we’re all constantly being reinfected with the dreaded batsoupflu from Wuhan. Take a look at this:

This review examines how capillary damage and inflammation may contribute to these acute and persisting COVID‐19 symptoms by interfering with blood and tissue oxygenation and with brain function. Undetectable by current diagnostic methods, capillary flow disturbances limit oxygen diffusion exchange in lungs and tissue and may therefore cause hypoxemia and tissue hypoxia. The review analyzes the combined effects of COVID‐19‐related capillary damage, pre‐existing microvascular changes, and upstream vascular tone on tissue oxygenation in key organs. It identifies a vicious cycle, as infection‐ and hypoxia‐related inflammation cause capillary function to deteriorate, which in turn accelerates hypoxia‐related inflammation and tissue damage. Finally, the review addresses the effects of low oxygen and high cytokine levels in brain tissue on neurotransmitter synthesis and mood.

I think almost everyone is suffering from this stuff to at least some degree. The whole COVID-19 syndrome seems to be causing damage to your blood vessels. The virus itself infects the endothelial cells that line your blood vessels, so your endothelial cells also start acting weird in an effort to avoid getting infected by it.

When I take some Psilocybe mushrooms, it feels like flushing down some clogged tubes. And you might say to yourself: “Well of course it does, it’s a placebo effect because you know this stuff.” But I remember feeling this to some degree in the past. and again, quoting the late great Lil Peep, who was already dead before Shi Zhengli left the refrigerator door open: It’s like a massage for your brain.

SARS-COV-2 doesn’t seem able to directly kill neurons by infecting them, but if it screws up the blood vessels your neurons depend on, then it will manage to kill them indirectly, through localized tissue hypoxia. That’s why you need to keep your microvascular blood vessels healthy.

There are a number of different things you can do. You need to practice running. You need to make sure you get enough vitamin K2 of course, so that calcium enters your bones instead of getting stuck to your blood vessels. You should also get some soy isoflavones, they are good for endothelial health as well. And equally important, nattokinase in Natto is an enzyme that digests junk, like amyloid fibrils.

But I think the most important piece of the puzzle may very well just be the microvascular blood vessel massage caused by a strange molecule found in certain types of mushrooms that’s very similar to serotonin and makes the endothelial cells lining the vessels contract and expand in a rythmic manner.

There are some things you have to keep in mind. In the current situation, I would recommend people to start out trying a microdose, then see if you have a headache the next day. The headache is not necessarily bad, but it can get very uncomfortable. If your microdose goes well, you can then just double it a few days later.

The other thing I have to recommend is to refrain from orgasm at least a few days before you take Psilocybe mushrooms. It’s basically just the same energy that the entities use to repair your brain, if you deplete yourself of that energy in advance, they will get upset and can’t do much for you.