University of Cincinnati researchers have examined post-treatment journals kept by participants in a smoking cessation study that found psychedelics were effective in helping some people quit smoking for years.
The examination of participants’ own words found that psychedelics combined with talk therapy often helped longtime smokers see themselves as non-smokers.
The researchers suggest that this new core identity might help explain why 80% of participants were able to stop smoking for six months and 60% remained smoking-free after five years.
The new paper has been published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal.
Smoking cessation
In a 2014 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, results demonstrated that participants who wanted to quit smoking and used psilocybin combined with cognitive behavioural therapy were far more likely to succeed than those who try other traditional quit-smoking methods.
Lead author and University of Cincinnati postdoctoral researcher Neşe Devenot said the results demonstrate the potential psychedelics have to reshape self-perceptions to help people break free of old habits or addictions.
Devenot, who studies the science, history and culture of psychedelics in UC’s Institute for Research in Sensing, said. “We saw again and again that people had this feeling that they were done with smoking and that they were a non-smoker now.
“If you want to give up meat but you smell a delicious steak, it might be hard to resist. But if you identify as a vegetarian and your sense of who you are is someone who does not eat meat, that identity helps encourage a different choice.”
During the smoking cessation study, therapists gave participants guided imagery exercises in which they were asked to envision smoking as a behaviour external to their core identity. The participants documented their experience in writing.
One guided imagery exercise from the study framed nicotine addiction as an external force, manipulating behaviour for its own ends.
“Like the Cordyceps fungi that functionally transforms insects into ‘zombified’ marionettes to serve the fungi’s own reproductive purposes, smoking behaviour is characterised as a form of parasitic manipulation,” the study found.
A catalyst for change
Assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University, Albert Garcia-Romeu, said psilocybin could serve as a catalyst to help motivate people to make a change with the help of cognitive behavioural therapy.
Garcia-Romeu said: “Cognitive behavioural therapy asks us to tune into the thoughts and feelings that we experience in our day-to-day lives and how those relate to our behaviours. In turn, people often tend to build a narrative or sense of self around those cognitions and behaviours.
“This sets the stage for actually having the psilocybin experience, which can both provide novel insights and perspectives as well as serve as a marker of that identity shift like a rite of passage, signifying the change for instance from smoker to non-smoker.”
Devenot said the experiment’s sample size was relatively small at just 15 participants. But the results are encouraging.
Some participants said the treatment with psilocybin made quitting feel easy compared to past experiences. Another said the cravings for nicotine used to be unbearable, but during the dosing session, the participant was unable even to imagine craving a cigarette.
Highlighting that people often get stuck in the same ruts of behaviour, responding the same way to stressors or other triggers, Devenot likens it to a downhill skier who uses the same grooved path down the mountain that they have used a thousand other times.
“It’s not that simple, but it’s a metaphor for how we talk about psychedelics,” Devenot said.
“Psychedelics have been compared to skiing in fresh snow. Some researchers suggest that you might have more freedom to manoeuvre your skis anywhere down the mountain. The entrenched grooves of bad habits might not have as much pull on our skis, so we can lay down other paths.
“We’re looking for ways to help people shift behaviours and overcome the inertia of their habits that are more in line with their goals and aspirations. That’s why psychedelics are of wider interest to researchers.”
