Q: How Do Psychedelics Unlock Creativity?
The neuroscience, practices, and experiences that link psychedelics to creativity.
Once a month, I unpack questions from real people exploring psychedelics because, while I’m not a doctor or scientist, “Ask April” is how meaningful dialogue begins.
How Do Psychedelics Unlock Creativity?
One of the most gratifying outcomes of microdosing this year has been the relationship I’ve reestablished with my creativity. A months-long microdosing experience captured on Substack in real time.
Looking back, it’s obvious: kicking off the year with SetSet’s Psychedelic Salon on Psychedelics & Creativity was the first flare I sent up in 2025. Some part of me wanted to reconnect with my first creative love—designing space and place. The environments we inhabit, the stories they tell, and their role as the backdrop of the stories we tell.
What’s unfolded since is proof that intentional, consistent psychedelic integration doesn’t turn us into someone new—it helps us say yes to what feels right right now, no matter where we are in our lives. As I’ve written before, some say psychedelics help us remember who we are.
This October, I binged Season 2 of The Telepathy Tapes. Episode 3—“The Consciousness of Creativity”—is an all-star cast of creatives talking about consciousness—Elizabeth Gilbert. Rick Rubin. Martha Beck. A roundtable on altered states and creativity.
Since we know that psychedelics expand consciousness by quieting the anxious, story-making parts of the brain and lighting up the more fluid, connective networks, it tracks that creativity would bloom in that same widened state. What The Telepathy Tapes reminded me is that creativity is its own form of altered consciousness. When the neurotic narrator finally quiets, and the channel for intuition, imagery, and insight turns on, the mind becomes more porous, more receptive. Ideas slip in the way of psychedelic visions: suddenly, whole, alive, insistent—a creative flow state.
And since psychedelics loosen rigid brain patterns and invite in new perspectives, it’s no surprise that creativity thrives on that same neuro-alchemy. The creative process and the psychedelic process run the same operating system: surrender a little control, receive what arrives, and allow the right-hemisphere networks that creativity depends on to come online—those same networks psychedelics amplify when the Default Mode Network quiets down. This is one way to understand how psychedelics influence creative work without getting lost in jargon.
Martha Beck, author of The Way of Integrity (one of my top 3 reads this year), talks about how anxiety and creativity live in mirrored structures on opposite sides of the brain. The left hemisphere spins anxious stories—what’s going to go wrong, what we’ll lose, how we’ve messed up. The right hemisphere gathers everything we know and rearranges it into something new—art, solutions, insight. When the creative networks light up, the anxious networks dim.
In her words: anxiety shuts down creativity, but creativity can also shut down anxiety. That is the quiet invitation beneath every microdosing experience for creative professionals who are also carrying a lot of anxiety: create in a way that only you can.
I didn’t expect my two professional worlds to converge this cleanly, but here we are.
As I prepare to share more about how my creativity and curiosity are merging in the new year, it felt like the right moment to return to where this year started: our Psychedelics & Creativity Salon at Town Hall Seattle with Tim Keck and Rachel Demy. The audience questions were more plentiful than the time to answer them, so in this Ask April column, I wanna revisit those questions—to expand, clarify, and, where possible, bring in the evidence. Think of this as a deeper dive into psychedelics and creativity, and how the state of our mind is influenced by both.
🎙️ Listen to this episode
Q: When did your relationship with psychedelics begin, and how has it evolved?
Tim Keck answered as you’d expect to hear from most Gen Xers:
“I first did psychedelics like probably most everybody has—when I was in college. Someone handed me a tab of acid at a party. Later, I started taking them in the mountains and finally understood how amazing they are. I don’t do huge doses; I do small amounts, always outdoors. Never inside.”
Rachel Demy’s entry point couldn’t have been more different:
“I grew up evangelical. I was terrified of demon possession and the unseen. But I was also deeply anxious. My first mushroom trip showed me that joy was possible—that there was another version of reality available to me.”
These two stories sketch out a familiar arc: psychedelics as novelty (party drug, college chaos) evolving into necessity (spiritual tool, mental health support). For Tim, the mountains became the container. For Rachel, psilocybin became a way to metabolize fear—a living example of psychedelics for overcoming fear and building a new relationship with herself and her creative work.
In clinical language, this is cognitive flexibility—the ability to loosen rigid beliefs and see new possibilities. Research from institutions like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London shows that psychedelics (especially psilocybin) temporarily increase the brain’s entropy—neural pathways become more fluid, and fixed patterns soften. If you’ve ever wondered, can psilocybin boost creativity?—this is the mechanism that makes that question worth asking.
Q: Can you describe your most recent psychedelic experience that had a direct connection to your creative work?
Rachel’s solo show, Revocable Living, was photographed during a time she later identified as active addiction.
“I was addicted to my ADHD meds. I didn’t know it. I thought I was just being productive,” she said. “Now, I’m trying to separate creativity from chemical acceleration. Psychedelics help me remember I can create without speed.”
That line—separating creativity from chemical acceleration—is essential. So much of our culture confuses being wired with being inspired. Psychedelics work differently.
One of the most compelling findings in psychedelic neuroscience is that psilocybin reduces activity in the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN)—the cluster of regions linked to self-referential rumination, perfectionism, and endless productivity loops. When the DMN quiets down, the anxious narrator in your head takes a seat, and the creative self finally has room to speak. This is one of the core ways psilocybin influences creative work: not by adding genius, but by subtracting noise.
The Center for MINDS calls this psychedelic-assisted innovation: using altered states to unblock “already effective personnel” and support breakthroughs in science, design, and leadership. Translation: your brain isn’t broken, but it may be over-managed by fear and habit.
Rachel’s story shows that creativity is not always about doing more. Sometimes it’s about releasing the overclocked system and remembering that you are still creative without the hustle and assisted chemistry.
Q: Have you ever had an experience where psychedelics helped you overcome creative blocks or rejection?
Rachel didn’t hesitate:
“Fear is my main emotional driver. I’m terrified of everything, but I’ve learned that courage doesn’t come from eliminating fear; it comes from knowing it won’t kill you.”
She describes her mushroom sessions as “irrefutable evidence” that she could survive the unbearable.
“It’s not that I’m not scared anymore. I just know what happens if I keep going.”
In psychology, creative block is often intertwined with the same machinery as threat response. Rejection email from the gallery? The reptilian brain lights up, fear floods the system, and suddenly the critic is louder than the muse.
Psychedelics—particularly psilocybin and MDMA—appear to reduce amygdala hyperactivity, lowering fear response and increasing emotional openness. So when Rachel says mushrooms taught her to move through fear, that’s not just vibe—it’s neuroplasticity. This is a real-life example of using psychedelics for overcoming fear.
And circling back to The Telepathy Tapes: if anxiety and creativity are housed in opposing hemispheres, then every time we activate creativity—on or off psychedelics—we’re literally giving the anxious side a break.
Q: How have psychedelics influenced your creative process?
When I asked Tim if he ever writes while tripping, he laughed:
“Anything I’ve written high reads like a Spencer’s Gifts poster. Useless in the moment—but later, things trickle down.”
That lag is crucial. Shift from thinking that psychedelics make you a creative genius while you’re high. For most of us, that’s not how psychedelics and creativity actually work. What they do is expand the system that creates; the work comes later, when you’re back in ordinary consciousness, the pathways are more open.
A classic 1966 pilot study by Willis Harman and James Fadiman gave mescaline to professionals—architects, engineers, designers. They produced 44 significant creative breakthroughs in a single session. Participants didn’t describe it as being “possessed by genius,” but as gaining unobstructed access to what was already there.
That word—unobstructed—is one I hear over and over.
For me, microdosing psilocybin doesn’t suddenly induce greater imagination, but it does increase my access to it by sharpening my awareness beyond what’s in front of me. This is the quiet reality of microdosing for creative professionals: not fireworks, but access.
From a brain perspective, that’s exactly what Martha Beck is talking about: shifting out of the anxious left-hemisphere narrative spiral and into the right hemisphere’s integrative mode—where everything you’ve lived, learned, and loved gets recombined into something new.
Q: What specifically about a trip supports your creative work?
Rachel’s answer resonated with me as a creative committed to bringing balance across the full spectrum of my life, my choices, my behavior:
“Whatever boosts my baseline well-being is a win.”
She’s onto something. Creativity doesn’t thrive in chaos; it thrives in coherence. Psychedelics, by promoting neural integration, seem to enhance that coherence. Some studies suggest that psilocybin sessions can increase traits like openness and aesthetic appreciation for months afterward—extending what people call the “afterglow” into a longer window of creative receptivity and more frequent access to a creative flow state.
In my own life, microdosing keeps me in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined as “flow”—that sweet spot between effort and surrender. Not manic output, not depressed paralysis, but the feeling of being in a supported, collaborative creative state.
The trip doesn’t teach creativity. It reminds your system that it’s safe to play again.
Q: Do you have any suggestions for a trip where stimulating creativity is the goal?
When I first began exploring psychedelics, creativity wasn’t my “why.” I was looking for relief—from burnout, overfunctioning, grief, The Pandemic. But after nearly five years of immersing myself in the science and “set” side of psychedelic Set & Setting, I see that in the next phase of my “midlife makeover” 😎 demands I invest less in understanding why/how/when/who - less intellectualizing/less in my head! - and lean more into my creativity through my heart and my body. How I sense things. how things feel.
This year, microdosing helped me explore my feelings by cultivating the witness within. Restoring access to imagination in a world that numbs it daily may require (near) daily perspective shift, making a trip for creative stimulation more longitudinal and less Heroic, so we can begin to once again tap into the feeling of flow while in the act of creating.
🎙️ Listen to this episode
Our constant connectivity has atrophied the muscles of wonder. Convenience, automation, algorithms—all of it saves time, yes, but at a cost. The cost is mystery. When everything is predictable and optimized, our nervous systems grow bored, and our creative instincts go dull. Ask yourself: Am I consuming more than I am creating?
The Center for MINDS calls this “imagination impairment.” Their researchers point to a steep decline in “disruptive innovation”—the kind that changes entire fields. A 2023 Nature study confirms it: since the 1940s, both scientific papers and patents have become less likely to introduce radically new ideas. In other words, innovation is slowing just when we need it most. (LIKE NOW! global warming, late-stage capitalism, mental health)
So yes, psychedelics can help restore imagination that’s gone dormant in our frictionless modern world. But they don’t hand you new ideas; they reconnect you to the parts of yourself that already have them.
In this way, a creative trip isn’t about producing. It’s about remembering. that word again.
Under the influence of psychedelics—and in states of deep creative flow—the brain’s Default Mode Network, the internal narrator, quiets. This loosens rigid thought patterns and allows unrelated ideas to collide in unexpected ways. You’re not forcing connections; you’re witnessing them emerge.
🔵 Read more on the Default Mode Network
In the Harman/Fadiman study, twenty-seven professionals—from engineers to artists—took mescaline in a structured session designed for problem-solving. The result? Forty-four breakthroughs in a single day. The substance mattered, but so did the environment: quiet, intentional, supported.
A question or theme that anchors the experience (“What wants to come through me?”) becomes a listening session rather than a brainstorming session. The goal is to notice what emerges, not to direct it. The creative work doesn’t happen on the medicine; it happens because of the medicine.
From the Salon, Tim’s advice still stands:
“Just doing mushrooms won’t make you more creative—but what happens afterward might.”
If creativity is your goal, design the experience like a residency for your nervous system:
Choose a sensory-rich setting.
Nature, good music, interesting textures, color. Think “museum after hours.”Set a simple intention, not an expectation.
“I’m open to seeing differently” is very different from “I must write my magnum opus today.”Honor the integration window.
In the days and weeks after, translate what you felt into form—write, draw, move, design, rearrange your living room like it’s the setting for your future self.
Q: How do you think about mushrooms and LSD vs. ayahuasca for creativity?
Each medicine has its own terroir. At the Salon, I said:
“Mushrooms ground you in the earth; ayahuasca shoots you to the stars.”
Psilocybin mushrooms literally emerge from soil and decay—symbols of death, renewal, and recycling what no longer serves. Ayahuasca is a vine that climbs toward the canopy—a medicine of cosmology, ancestors, and big-picture reorientation. LSD was synthesized in a lab and is often cut with amphetamine, and IMO there’s an amplification that feels born of man’s creation - accelerated, less connected to the earthly plane.
Psilocybin tends to open the emotional imagination. It brings feeling to the foreground—sensation, memory, the subconscious landscape where intuition and imagery live. The work that follows a mushroom journey often carries emotional truth: you remember why you create, and you might personally answer the question “can psilocybin boost creativity?” in your own body.
LSD is more cerebral, geometric, and structured. It expands perspective across time and systems—great for visioning, pattern recognition, and design thinking. It’s no coincidence that Nobel laureate Kary Mullis credited LSD with inspiring PCR (polymerase chain reaction). Steve Jobs said his LSD experiences “reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money.”
Ayahuasca deepens creativity differently. The brew’s intelligence is archetypal—it strips away ego, confronts shadow, and reorganizes purpose. Dr. Bruce Damer, MINDS founder and NASA astrobiologist, describes his ayahuasca insights as “a conversation with creation itself.”
Q: Can psychedelics help restore imagination dulled by modern technology?
Short answer: they can help—but they’re not a one-click reset.
We’ve optimized ourselves out of awe. The average person spends hours a day staring into screens designed to hijack attention and drip-feed novelty while starving us of meaning. Long-term, this continuous, shallow stimulation is linked to changes in brain regions involved in empathy and creativity.
This is what the Center for MINDS calls imagination impairment—the same phenomenon we touched on earlier. A world where innovation slows just as our crises speed up.
Psychedelics pull in the opposite direction. They expand the sensory field. They re-wild the mind. Colors intensify, sounds layer, time stretches. The world stops being “content” and goes back to being a living environment. For creative professionals considering microdosing, this is often the first reported shift: the world feels alive again.
Q: What if someone appreciates psychedelics’ creativity but has had terrifying experiences?
The same openness that invites inspiration can also let fear rush in. When your mind is suddenly flooded with new connections, some will be beautiful; others, confronting.
Fear isn’t the enemy of creativity; it reveals where we don’t trust—ourselves, the process, or the container.
As I told one audience member:
“Fear is data.”
Paranoia often arises when your nervous system feels unsafe, not because the content of the trip is inherently dark.
Preparation helps:
Somatic practices (breathwork, shaking, grounding)
A familiar environment
A trusted sitter
Music that feels grounding
A tactile object—a smooth stone, a soft scarf, something that reminds you of the physical world
An intention that includes permission: I’m here to receive what serves my creativity—and to let go of what doesn’t.
If paranoia does surface, don’t fight it. Breathe. Get curious. Cultivate your inner witness. Fear, after all, is part of the creative process. Every artist, inventor, and writer knows the terror of confronting something larger than themselves. Psychedelics make that confrontation literal.
Robin Carhart-Harris’s entropic brain theory suggests that psychedelics temporarily increase the brain’s chaos to allow new order to emerge. For those walking back from paranoia or panic, start smaller: lower doses, clearer intentions, trusted facilitators, and environments that feel safe to your body, not just your rational mind.
As Rachel put it:
“You can’t live in ego death every day. Sometimes, it’s enough just to remember that you’ve been there—and made it back.”
Q: Set and setting: where do you go to be creative on psychedelics?
Tim keeps it simple:
“Always outside. Never at a party. The mountains are my studio.”
Rachel has her ritual:
“Easter Sunday—every year. It’s about resurrection, reclaiming ritual.”
Research backs what most of us know intuitively: nature-based settings increase the odds of meaningful, mystical, and creative experiences. Sound matters too—music can literally guide the brain through rhythmic entrainment, syncing neural activity to the arc of the journey.
Curiosity is the seed of creation and the antidote to fear. Today, we need what psychedelics and creativity can offer each other now, not to escape reality—but to remake it.
Take care,
April
How wonderful that you're preparing with intention - and I sense your enthusiasm, so I share the following in the spirit of your best outcome! I'm very nervous that you're planning to consume mushrooms you've been saving for years. I want you to make the most of your sacred time, so please listen this epsiode. https://open.substack.com/pub/aprilpride/p/what-kills-magic-mushroom-potency?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
The LSD will maintain its potency, so perhaps you can plan to begin earlier in the day. It's a 10-hour ride, which is long but better than expecting a psilocybin experience that delivers nada.
Microdosing and larger dose psilocybin experiences aren't comparable. Wishing you the experience your soul is seeking.
I can share a lot on this. lol 😂 oh the history! Can’t wait to read in a bit!