Why Some People Get Worse After Psychedelics

The Psychedelic Blog is an independent media brand covering drugs, altered states & the culture surrounding them.

This week: Why some people don’t get better after Psychedelics…they get worse.

The first few months after my first transcendent experience with Bufo, I was insufferable.

A lifelong atheist, I had just “experienced the divine” & became a believer overnight. I used to say “evidence trumps anecdote.” Then I had an anecdote so overwhelming it bulldozed every standard I used to hold. And like most people who stumble into something that feels ultimate, I didn’t just keep it to myself…I turned it into a worldview. Then a personality, followed by a mission.

That’s the trap.

I took something deeply personal & tried to make it a template for others. You see this everywhere in Psychedelic circles—the sudden certainty, the prescriptions for how everyone else should engage:

Only this setting, only this medicine, only this tradition, only this path.

It sounds thoughtful on the surface, but it’s usually just someone projecting their own peak experience outward and calling it wisdom.

At the same time, I became wildly porous to new ideas. Not in a grounded, curious way…in a “my entire operating system just got wiped in 15 minutes, so let’s reinstall anything that sounds interesting” kind of way. Conspiracies, half-baked frameworks, podcast logic dressed up as insight…if it poked a hole in something conventional, I was in. I mistook skepticism for intelligence & novelty for depth.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that blowing up your worldview doesn’t automatically upgrade it. It just makes you more impressionable.

I was convinced Psychedelics were the answer. What I couldn’t see yet is that they were an answer…for me.

Eventually, things settled. Less certainty, less evangelizing, more self-awareness. I recalibrated, but not everyone does. Some people take these experiences and become more grounded, more thoughtful, more human. Others become harder to talk to, harder to be around, and, frankly, kind of annoying.

Here’s why.

Insight Inflation

Feeling something deeply doesn’t mean you understand it accurately.

Intensity gets mistaken for truth. One powerful experience starts carrying the weight of an entire worldview, and suddenly something that happened to you once becomes how reality works.

Over-Porosity (Loss of Filters)

Openness spikes, but discernment doesn’t keep up.

You start letting everything in…ideas that sound profound but aren’t, frameworks that feel true but collapse under the slightest pressure. “If it resonates, it’s true” becomes the rule. That’s usually where things start to drift.

Premature Certainty

One experience → sweeping conclusions about reality, purpose, relationships.

Nuance disappears. Doubt gets reframed as “lower awareness.” And the more certain you feel, the less interested you are in questioning it.

Status Inversion

“I’ve seen something you haven’t.”

It’s rarely said outright, but it leaks into tone, cadence, posture. The experience becomes a hierarchy, and somehow the thing that was supposed to make you more open ends up making you harder to be around.

Integration Avoidance

The hard part isn’t the experience…it’s what comes after.

Most people skip it. They chase the next insight instead of doing anything with the last one, mistaking accumulation for growth.

Relational Degradation

Tolerance drops for people who haven’t had the same experiences.

Conversations flatten & connection gets replaced with subtle judgment, impatience, or just checking out entirely.

Pre-Existing Traits, Amplified

Avoidance, narcissism, instability…none of that disappears.

If anything, it gets sharper. Psychedelics don’t fix structure…they expose it, and whatever was already there tends to come through a little louder.

The Tradeoff No One Talks About

You can become more aware & less functional.

More open & less grounded. More “awake” but harder to be around.

Closing Thoughts

The experience doesn’t make you better…what you do after it does.

That’s the part I missed in 2019. I thought the revelation was the transformation…it wasn’t. It was an opening. And openings can lead to humility, discernment, patience & real change…or they can lead to spiritual cosplay, shitty podcasts & becoming the least fun person at dinner.

So don’t be like 2019 Andrew. Let the experience breathe, let your certainty cool off, keep your discernment intact. Don’t turn your private revelation into public doctrine.

The medicine may open the door, but you still have to learn how to walk through it without becoming an asshole.