I stand in front of the mirror holding onto my crystal gua sha as if it were a surgical tool, gliding it along the curvature of my face with the precision and focus of an open-heart surgeon. My skincare routine used to be fun, enjoyable, my sacred beauty ritual time. Then I turned 30 and shit got serious. I started noticing lines that were never there. They appeared out of thin air, wrinkles deepening, texture changing, and now most of the serums I’m applying have the word “youth” in them.
If you’re over the age of 30, I imagine you read this with an eye roll and a grimace. “30, you still have your whole life ahead of you.” It’s great to hear that, but it would be greater to feel it.
We live in a culture that has become remarkably skilled at treating aging like a problem.
Wrinkles are something to erase. Gray hair is something to cover. Muscle loss is something to fight. Our changing bodies are measured against an imaginary version of ourselves that never gets older.
The message is subtle but persistent: stay young, stay productive, stay relevant.
But isn’t aging a privilege?
No seriously. I looked up the statistics on the death of children, and I’ll save us those grim (large) numbers here, but the number of humans who don’t make it to adulthood is astonishing and devastating. Even once we do make it to adulthood (whatever that means), we seem to forget the stone-truth platitude: Another day is not promised.
What if aging is one of the most beautiful aspects of the human experience? What if that truth has been co-opted by corporations and a society that wants us to believe in a different truth? And what if psychedelics and plant medicine can re-orient us back into coherence with a richer navigation of our aging experience?
One of the most interesting questions emerging around psychedelics and aging isn’t whether psychedelics can help us live forever, but whether they might help us live more fully within the time we have.
There is a growing scientific interest in the relationship between psychedelics, the aging brain, and healthy aging, and what researchers call healthspan; not simply how long we live, but how many of those years we spend with physical, cognitive, emotional, and social vitality.
Would you rather live till 150 with half of that time spent in a decrepit state, or live 85 rich, fulfilling, vitality-filled years?
Psilocybin and healthy aging are particularly interesting areas of research because of psilocybin’s relationship with neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to form new patterns, the brain’s ability to adapt and reorganize throughout life. Research suggests that psychedelic experiences can temporarily increase certain forms of neural flexibility, potentially creating a window in which new patterns of thought and behavior become more possible. Researchers are working steadily to understand how these findings translate into meaningful long-term benefits for aging humans.
Researchers are now beginning to study this question directly. In 2026, UC Berkeley launched a study exploring whether psilocybin might support “successful aging” in cognitively healthy older adults. Another multicenter Phase 1 trial is examining the safety and tolerability of psilocybin in adults ages 65–85, including effects on mood, cognition, blood pressure, heart rhythm, and how the body processes the compound.
The research is intriguing. We’ll dive deeper in next week’s blog.
If you want to explore the science already emerging around this topic, we’ve also looked at whether magic mushrooms could play a role in healthy aging.
But even more interesting (at least to me) is the philosophical branch of this topic.
Aging is not simply an accumulation of years. It is a continuous process of unfolding and becoming.
We lose things. We gain things. Our bodies change. Our relationships change. Our priorities change. People we love die. New generations arrive. Parts of ourselves we had no clue existed emerge from whereabouts unknown. Parts of ourselves that once felt absolutely essential eventually fall away.
There is grief in this.
But there can also be freedom.
Plant medicine can sometimes bring us face-to-face with impermanence. A psychedelic experience may temporarily loosen our attachment to familiar identities and stories, reminding us that the self is not as fixed as we often imagine.
And perhaps this is one reason mystical psychedelic experiences can feel so meaningful at different stages of life.
When we are young, we may be asking:
Who am I becoming?
This question can remain a constant—and, as we grow older, the question can also shift into:
Who am I willing to become now?
That is a very different kind of transformation.
One of the most striking things psychedelics can do is alter our ordinary relationship with time.
Hours can feel expansive. Memories can feel immediate. The past can suddenly feel present. The future can become less abstract.
For someone entering a new stage of life, this altered relationship with time may offer a different perspective on mortality—not necessarily making death less frightening (although that can happen, and studies on this are remarkable), but making life feel more precious.
Perhaps aging asks us to become increasingly intimate with the truth that everything changes.
Our bodies.
Our relationships.
Our identities.
The seasons.
The people we love.
Nothing stays still.
And yet, somehow, life continues creating itself.
There is something similar in the way mushrooms can shift our understanding of our place within the larger world, a relationship we explored in Remembering We Belong: Mushrooms and Our Relationship with Nature.
There is an interesting parallel between psychological flexibility and neuroplasticity as we age.
As we age, certain patterns can become deeply established. Buddhism refers to this as samskaras. We know our routines. We know our identities. We know how we think of ourselves and how we expect the world to respond to us.
There is comfort in this.
But there can also be rigidity.
One of the reasons researchers are interested in psychedelics is their potential to temporarily disrupt habitual patterns of brain activity and perception. Rather than simply adding information to an already-established system, psychedelics may create conditions in which the brain becomes more receptive to new associations and perspectives.
This changing relationship between psilocybin and familiar patterns of thought is also part of what researchers are beginning to understand about how psilocybin affects the brain and the default mode network.
Perhaps aging well isn’t about keeping the brain exactly as it was when we were twenty.
Perhaps it is about preserving our capacity to change.
To remain curious.
To revise our beliefs.
To make new friends.
To fall in love again.
To begin something we’ve never done before.
To let an old version of ourselves die without believing that we have died with it.
There is already significant interest in whether psychedelics might eventually play a role in supporting healthy aging. There has even been early laboratory research exploring psilocybin and cellular aging, and yet the future of psychedelic medicine doesn’t have to be about finding the next substance that promises to keep us young forever.
Maybe it can help us ask a better question:
What does it mean to become old well?
To become softer without becoming smaller.
To become wiser without becoming rigid.
To carry our history without being imprisoned by it.
To accept the changing body while continuing to inhabit it fully.
To understand that a life doesn’t become less meaningful because it is finite.
Aging is not the opposite of becoming.
Aging is becoming.
Every wrinkle, loss, relationship, beginning, ending, and transformation is part of the same unfolding process.
Maybe, just maybe, plant medicine can offer us a new relationship with that process by helping us become more awake to the time we have and the process we are blessed enough to find ourselves in.
Perhaps that is a far more meaningful form of longevity.
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