Immersion

Why do some sessions feel more intense than others?

Short answer

Sessions differ because more than the medicine shapes them. In a large analysis of psilocybin sessions, how intense and how pleasant an experience felt depended on the person's mood going in, a trait called absorption, and the setting around them. The same medicine can land very differently on different days.

The research
Studerus, E., Gamma, A., Kometer, M., and Vollenweider, F. X. (2012). Prediction of psilocybin response in healthy volunteers. PLoS ONE, volume 7, issue 2, article e30800.
Sample 409 psilocybin sessions given to 261 healthy volunteers, pooled from 23 controlled studies
Published 2012
Journal PLoS ONE
Erich Studerus and colleagues at the University of Zurich pooled the records from 23 controlled experimental studies run in the same lab. That gave them 409 psilocybin sessions across 261 healthy volunteers, one of the largest collections of its kind. They tested 24 possible predictors of how each session went, from age and sex to personality traits, recent mental state, and the setting of the session. The strength of the medicine itself was the single biggest factor, as you would expect. But it was not the only one. Several non-drug factors clearly shaped the experience too. People who scored high on a trait called absorption, meaning a tendency to get deeply drawn into imagery, music, and inner experience, and people who felt emotionally alive and active right before the session, and who had been through few psychological struggles in the prior weeks, were the most likely to have pleasant and mystical-type experiences. On the other side, high emotional excitability, younger age, and a more clinical, high-stimulation setting were the factors most tied to anxious or unpleasant reactions. The authors concluded that non-pharmacological variables play an important role in how a session unfolds.

What does this mean for you?

The plain takeaway is that a session is not just chemistry. The same person, with the same medicine, can have a gentle experience one day and a stormy one another. Part of what makes the difference is what you carry in with you: your mood that day, how settled or raw you feel, and how easily you get drawn into deep inner experience. Part of it is the room and the people around you. These are the pieces that shaped whether a session felt pleasant or hard in this large dataset.

It is worth being honest about the limits. This was a study of healthy volunteers in a research setting, not people in treatment, and it looked at what predicted experiences on average across hundreds of sessions. It cannot tell you how your next session will feel. Absorption and emotional excitability are tendencies, not switches you can flip, and a rough day going in does not doom a session. Read this as a map of what tends to matter, not a rule about any one person.

Even with those limits, the direction is useful and it matches what many people notice. Intensity is not random and it is not only about the medicine. Your inner state and your surroundings are part of the equation, and those are the parts you and your care team can actually tend to. That is a hopeful thing. It means a hard session is not a personal failing, and a steadier state going in is something you can work toward.

The takeaway

Terms in this page
Set and setting Grounding

This is the work Asendar™ was built for: helping you notice the state you are carrying into a session, so the conditions you bring are as steady as they can be. If you want a simple read on where your head is today, take your Mental Readiness Score.

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People also ask

Does the amount of medicine decide how intense a session feels?

It was the single biggest factor in this study, but not the only one. Even holding the medicine steady, a person's mood before the session, their trait of absorption, and the setting all helped predict how intense and how pleasant the experience was.

What is absorption and why does it matter for a session?

Absorption is a personality trait, a tendency to get deeply drawn into imagery, music, and inner experience. In this analysis, people who scored high on absorption were among the most likely to have pleasant and mystical-type experiences during their sessions.

Can your mood before a session change how it goes?

In this study it was linked. People who felt emotionally alive and active beforehand, and who had been through few psychological struggles in recent weeks, tended toward more pleasant experiences, while high emotional excitability was tied to more anxious reactions.

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