Use Psilocybin To Improve Athletic Performance
There’s something truly magical about watching our favorite athletes perform at their best. The incredible feats of strength, the unbelievable speed and precision, and their unbreakable commitment to succeeding at the highest level. Professional athletes and aspiring trainees alike can attest to the fact that athletic performance is a difficult balancing act between mental fitness and physical prowess. If you’ve ever competed in sports or athletic contests, you already know how mentally and emotionally draining it can be to maintain a certain level of athletic performance – not to mention the physical toll on your body.
Whether you decide to commit your existence to honing your mind & body into a high-performance machine, or you’re just looking to stay active and healthy, there are a lot of supplements you might need to take in order to stay at your best. Protein powders, vitamins, weight-gainers, weight-loss pills, and a slew of other health & fitness supplements are a common daily occurrence for those committed athletic individuals. Even if you’re a nutritional wizard, maintaining a well-balanced diet that empowers you to be at peak physical and mental fitness, sometimes there’s just something missing. Could it be sleep related? Are you struggling with something mentally? Is there some dietary deficiency you overlooked?
Maintaining top notch athletic performance can be like balancing on one foot while trying to juggle flaming chainsaws (a ridiculous mental image, but seriously, it can be tough to keep it all together!). On one hand, you have to push your body and constantly challenge yourself physically. On the flip side, your mental state is the driving force for success or failure, so you have to stay sharp and manage your neurological health, emotions and moods. How can a mere human being maintain such juxtapositions of mental stability with physical exertion? For today’s athletes, it’s not so much a question of what as it is a matter of how much.
Microdosing psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics has become a very noticeable feather in the modern athlete’s cap. People who take psilocybin to improve athletic performance are finding that these unassuming little fungi can have life-changing impacts on our mental, physical and metaphysical health. Psilocybin athletic performance might just be the key to riding the knife’s edge of mental focus and physical prowess. Have you tried taking magic mushrooms to improve your athletic performance? Let’s do some reps with magic mushrooms and pump our knowledge about how they can improve your athletic performance.
HOW DOES PSILOCYBIN IMPROVE ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE?
Whenever athletes or fitness-conscious individuals consider taking a new supplement, they often have doubts about adding any new elements to their regime. This is especially true when it comes to magic mushrooms. You might be wondering: “how can psilocybin athletic performance differ from my personal best?”.
Most people don’t think much about psilocybin – in fact, a lot of the current belief about shrooms and the people who consume them has to do with negative stereotypes. Magic mushrooms and other psychedelics are considered to be merely illicit, controlled substances to the general populace. There are a growing number of people who are turning to psychedelic mushrooms to help with many health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, PTSD and insomnia. Nonetheless, the pervasive public opinion about psilocybin is that it is not an accepted commodity or form of medicine.
This sentiment is doubly-so for professional athletes whose daily intake of food, medicine, health supplements and even pain medications have to be sanctioned by regulatory bodies. Everything an athlete puts in their body needs to be managed, and even if something isn’t restricted such as caffeine, they’re in an industry that promotes self-regulating and strict management. Balance is key to many aspects of athletic performance, and what you put into your body can greatly impact what you get out of it.
Turning to alternative health & fitness supplements like psilocybin can seem very daunting to individuals who are new to psychedelics. For many people, their first encounters with psychoactive compounds are associated with loss of control, intense hallucinations, and potentially life-changing experiences. On the contrary, if you ask any experienced psychedelics user they’ll regale you with stories of profound enlightenment or new and exciting ways of perceiving themselves, others and the world around them. Seasoned psychonauts might be more savvy explorers of their inner cosmos, but anyone can plumb the depths of their psyche and learn a lot about themselves. When you look past your initial fears of psychotropic substances, you might find what you’ve been looking for the whole time: enlightenment, peace, creativity, perspective, motivation and much more. Physical fitness and athletic performance are heavily influenced by your mental and emotional states. Something that many athletic individuals struggle with is performance anxiety, depression and loss of confidence, even fear of injury.
Athletes that are able to perform at the highest levels in sports and fitness are typically the most mentally strong, confident and logical people you’ll ever meet. Imagine the kinds of pressures that affect an Olympic athlete, whose entire country’s hopes and dreams might rest on mere minutes of them competing against other highly-driven individuals? To perform well in a physical sense, you have to possess a very strong mental faculty as well – there’s no such thing as “success through luck” when it comes to athletic performance.
Looking beyond professional athleticism, everyday active individuals are under a lot of different degrees of pressure as well: pressure to perform at work, to be a good parent or family member, to uphold the laws of society, and to be a positive influence in general. Even if you’re just playing hockey after a full day at the office, or hitting the gym with some friends, you might feel the pressures that come with playing sports or pursuing fitness excellence. Sports and exercise are inherently fun – that’s why we use them to decompress after work! – but challenging yourself physically can lead you to mental exhaustion. How can you be sure that you’re as mentally sharp as you are physically fit? It’s as simple as ‘psilocybin’.
Microdosing magic mushrooms is an excellent way to enhance your cognition, balance your mood, boost your motivation and creativity, and supplement your neurological health. These two concepts of cognitive enhancement and mood regulation are the core reasons for why psilocybin athletic performance might be superior to competing without it.
What does enhanced cognition mean? Cognitive enhancement refers to any kind of improved functionality, be it increased alacrity or mental clarity. Some examples of common cognitive enhancements you can expect from consuming psilocybin:’
- Quicker reflexes
- Increased preceptiveness
- Enhanced focus
- Greater processing speed (mental fluidity, creativity, productivity)
- Improved awareness (peripherals, surroundings, social & behavioral cues)
These are just a few of the major highlights for psilocybin athletic performance enhancements. Magic mushrooms can also impact your ability to solve problems, change the way you perceive the world around you, or how you respond to certain stimuli. For instance, a common benefit of psilocybin for sports is an increased sense of timing. How quickly you can respond to a pass, or how efficiently you can visualize a play can determine your personal success or failure in a game. Sports require a lot of speed, both in terms of physical reactions but also cognitive functionality. If your ability to perceive events is heightened, if you can process outcomes and respond quicker, and if your creativity is enhanced you’ll be well-equipped to put yourself in favorable situations.
Not only will your athletic performance benefit from greater reactions, you will also be able to keep up with the ebb-and-flow of the game better. Timing isn’t everything in sports, but it can make or break your performance if you don’t have a handle on your capacity for speedy reactions. Being physically fit and healthy are obviously important to athletic performance as well, but if you don’t have the mental capacity to put your muscles to good use you may as well be standing still. Our brains are the engines that make our body stop and go, so don’t overlook the importance of your mental health and cognitive functionality when it comes to optimizing athletic performance.
How does mood regulation work? Regulating mood is a bit different from cognitive enhancement, in that many people don’t put enough emphasis on managing their emotions. For many people, especially some professional athletes, the real trick is to suppress, regulate or reduce the intensity of their emotions. Keeping a level head is crucial to being able to handle high-pressure situations, that is of no doubt. However, holding your emotions at bay or trying to ignore the impact of your moods can have detrimental effects to your health.
Depression, anxiety, emotional trauma, insomnia and a host of other conditions can emerge from prolonged negative emotional states. Some athletes feel that they have to keep their emotions in check in order to push themselves during training, or to devote all of their energy to performing well when it matters most. These notions aren’t incorrect – it does take a lot of mental & physical control to achieve your goals – but ignoring or suppressing your emotions is not a long-term solution. How can psilocybin help to regulate your mood and help you to be at your best? To answer this question, we need to consider the impact that psychedelics can have on a person, as well as the pros and cons of microdosing vs psychedelic tripping.
Magic mushrooms have been relied on for centuries by ancient peoples, such as Mesoamericans and First Nations, and for good reason. The psychedelic experiences that our ancestors had helped to form their beliefs systems, enhanced their spirituality, and heightened their connection to the natural world, and in many ways to each other. Psychedelic experiences have been shown to transform a person’s perceptions of their surroundings, the universe in general, and their relationships with others. Greater emotive capacity, empathy to others, and an improved understanding of your own behavior and the behaviors of others are all examples of the benefits of psychedelics like psilocybin.
If you aren’t keen on experiencing hallucinations – even the kinds of visions that might positively impact your life – you can still work on balancing your moods when you microdose magic mushrooms. Microdosing appears to accomplish a lot of the same things as psychedelic tripping – such as balancing serotonin levels, increasing mental focus, energy and creativity – without involving any of the psychotropic effects associated with “getting high”.
Many athletes struggle with taking the practical approach to performance issues – training harder at the gym, trying a new regiment, switching up their diet, or even altering how they mentally prepare for big events. These can cure symptoms of the problem, but oftentimes the crux of the matter is an emotional hurtle that they’re just not able to clear. So what can psilocybin do to help you overcome these kinds of mental & emotional roadblocks? The chemical compound psilocybin is considered to be capable of neurogenesis – the mapping and connecting of new neural pathways in the brain. Essentially, psilocybin can promote new ways of thinking, behaving and therefore generate novel physical, mental and emotional reactions.
This is an extremely exciting new field of study that requires more attention before it can be practically applied to professional athletes. Nevertheless, just ask any of the athletes who have experimented with psilocybin for mood regulation and they’ll tell you a similar story: it raises the bar for what you believe is possible.
MAGIC MUSHROOMS, MAGICAL ATHLETES
Whether you choose to explore your psyche with the full psilocybin experience, or if you prefer to play it safe and microdose shrooms, there are a lot of ways you can balance your moods and put yourself in the right headspace. To perform at your best, you need to visualize success. This means focusing your energy on positivity and staying motivated, but maintaining your drive is easier said than done. If visualization is the key to achieving victory, so why not trust in a natural compound that can help you shape that vision and achieve your goals? Psilocybin can accomplish this as well as help you stay focused and energized, so it’s no wonder that it’s receiving a lot of attention from high-performance athletes like MMA fighters, racecar drivers, extreme sportspeople and professional golfers.
Not only does microdosing psilocybin offer a bevvy of benefits to your mood and cognitive performance, but similar to cannabis supplementation, magic mushrooms can be an effective treatment for some conditions that are very detrimental to performance. Headaches, depression, substance abuse, chronic anxiety, even fatigue have been shown to be positively impacted by psilocybin. Check out our other blogs on fighting substance abuse with magic mushrooms and what kinds of effects these fantastical fungi can have on your mind and body.
As always, be sure to dose low and go slow when experimenting with magic mushrooms – even if you’re just microdosing. With as much dedication to responsible psilocybin use, you can enhance your athletic performance and work towards achieving your goals… All you need is a little mushroom love in your day-to-day routine.
