Our brains love patterns. They’re very good at using them to make predictions and keep us safe. If something hurt you in the past, like a hot stove, your brain uses that information to help you avoid getting hurt again. As far as survival goes, it’s a useful and efficient system.
This very system, however, can sometimes strengthen unhelpful patterns. When we feel stuck in life, negative thoughts such as “I’m a failure” or “Nothing goes my way” can arise. If repeated often enough, the brain begins to reinforce those thought patterns, which can quickly become rigid and self-perpetuating. Over time, these persistent feelings of “stuckness” can lead to anxiety or depression.
The key to getting unstuck is by focusing on emotional flexibility, which is your ability to be open to new experiences. While achieving this emotional pliability takes effort through methods like conventional therapy or mindfulness, responsible psychedelic use has also demonstrated its potential to boost emotional flexibility. Here's what you need to know about this increasingly popular approach.
Emotional flexibility is a person’s ability to stay in the present moment and choose behavior based on values rather than reacting automatically to difficult emotions, whereas rigidity is the tendency to respond to emotions in fixed, inflexible ways.
If you zoom out, rigidity and flexibility are two ends of the same spectrum:
Emotional rigidity is one of the primary mechanisms by which human beings lose their freedom to respond rather than merely react. Viktor Frankl famously observed that between every stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space lies our freedom and capacity to choose. Rigidity compresses that space, while flexibility widens it.
Rigidity isn’t random. It’s learned, reinforced, and biologically supported. It is what happens when a system designed for safety becomes overly stuck in one mode at the expense of more adaptive behaviors.
One way this happens is through avoidance learning. When we escape or suppress something painful, the brain considers it a success and says, “Good, we avoided danger”. This works when the threat is real, like a lion. But when the “danger” is a feeling or thought, we can begin to treat internal experiences as threats, too.
A review by Wang et al., 2024 suggests that maladaptive avoidance is a central feature of many mental health conditions. The more we avoid, the more stuck we feel. The result is a shrinking range of responses, which disrupts our ability to cope with the ups and downs of life.
In depression and anxiety, this rigidity becomes deeply ingrained. The brain starts to rely heavily on established patterns, such as negative self-beliefs, catastrophic thinking, and rumination, to manage life situations. The more those patterns are reinforced, the harder it is to change them.
Dr. Mendel Kaelen likens this to sledding: “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill.” Once you establish a path in the snow, sledding down a hill is quick and easy. But if you eventually want to veer off that path and try a new one, you’ll find that the deep grooves you’ve made hold you in place.
Rather than waste energy establishing new neural connections, your brain will prioritize the pathways that you use over and over again. This is simply because the brain favors energy efficiency. But psychedelics can help interrupt this cycle. By temporarily altering neural connectivity, they loosen established pathways, increase communication across the brain, and make it easier to form new patterns.
Psychedelics researchers Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and Dr. Karl Friston illustrate this with the “Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics" (REBUS) model, which is built on the idea that your brain is constantly generating predictions about reality and updating them based on incoming information.
According to the REBUS model, your perception of the world is heavily shaped by “priors” or learned beliefs about how the world works. Priors can be incredibly useful and help you move through the world efficiently without having to re-learn everything from scratch. But when these beliefs become too rigid or overly dominant, problems arise.
With psychedelics, however, these rigid priors can relax. The brain becomes more open to new information, creating a window where previously fixed beliefs can be questioned and reinterpreted. This is the beginning of emotional flexibility.
While studies are still elucidating exactly how psychedelics act therapeutically in our brain, it’s generally thought that this increased flexibility is linked to activation of serotonin 2A receptors and changes in large-scale brain networks like the Default Mode Network (DMN), which helps maintain a stable sense of self. In conditions like depression, the DMN can become overactive, reinforcing rigid belief systems.
Psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin shake up this stability. By acting on 5-HT2A receptors, they boost brain entropy and decrease activity in the DMN, allowing it to loosen its grip on identity. At this juncture, your brain has reached a “pivot” point, a state where it becomes highly malleable and hyper-receptive to new learning.
It’s similar to shaking a snow globe. When your brain is doing business as usual, the snow is settled. But when you add psychedelics, the snow becomes disrupted, allowing it to settle in new patterns. The rigid "grooves" of habitual thought are temporarily covered, allowing new, flexible paths to be formed.
When a difficult thought arises during a psychedelic experience, like “I am worthless,” and it no longer feels absolute, a window of opportunity can open. Instead of reflexively avoiding the emotion, a person can choose to turn toward it with curiosity.
This shift from resistance to openness strengthens psychological flexibility. It also aligns closely with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which encourages people to engage with their internal experience and act in line with their values. Studies show psychedelics can potentially accelerate this process by temporarily dismantling the avoidance mechanisms that keep people stuck.
As one patient in a study by Watts et al., 2017 described: “Afterward, I allowed myself to experience everything, even if it is sadness. Now I know how to deal with my feelings rather than repress them.”
Clinical research increasingly points to psychological flexibility as a key mechanism in psychedelic therapy.
Participants in psychedelic studies often report less avoidant behaviors and greater engagement with life, suggesting that emotional flexibility is central to healing.
Davis et al., 2021 found that increases in psychological flexibility mediate reductions in depression and anxiety following psychedelic therapy. As Davis explains, “Psychological flexibility is about being open, being present in your life, and doing what matters in the face of obstacles. Psychedelic experiences are associated with increasing one’s ability to engage in this way.”
One of the most compelling aspects of this research is the durability of its effects. In some studies, a single psychedelic session led to improvements in mood and well-being lasting months to years.
A key predictor of these long-term benefits is the occurrence of a “mystical-type” experience characterized by feelings of interconnectedness, acceptance, and deep emotional insight. However, the mystical experience itself is not the endpoint. Its value lies in how it shifts perspective and loosens rigid beliefs.
Psychedelics can act as fresh snowfall, covering the well-worn tracks of your existing thought patterns. But when the snow settles again, familiar grooves can easily reform. Without integration, the brain often returns to its old patterns and rigid ways. Post-experience practices can keep you from getting stuck again.
Integration is the process of translating insights from a psychedelic experience into lasting change. Integration practices can help stabilize and deepen emotional flexibility:
After psychedelic experiences, many people feel buoyed by an elevated mood, new clarity, and a sense of possibility. It’s what researchers call the “afterglow phenomenon,” but it doesn’t last long. Without support, it’s easy to fall back into old patterns. Lasting change requires repetition, just as staying strong requires going to the gym. Emotional flexibility is built the same way as muscle: through consistent use.
Retreat programs with strong integration support can help you sustain the changes. Integration workbooks, therapy, or consistent meditation practice are also ways to continue gaining from the experience.
In the end, emotional flexibility isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about loosening the grip of who you thought you had to be, so you can respond to life in a way that’s more aligned with who you actually are.