Turns out, you can learn a lot about what people experience when they go on psychedelic trips if you set up a hotline that trippers can call if their experience is going a little haywire and they need someone to calm them down.

Detailed in a study published in Science Advances, researchers analyzed 25,119 anonymous calls and texts from the Fireside Project’s Psychedelic Support Line, which gives people on psychedelic trips a place to call so they can get more information on psychedelics or to be coached through a bad trip. Researchers from Paris, Geneva, and the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies collected the largest dataset of drug trips in human history, stretching from 2021 to 2026.

The advantage here is that the participants weren’t in a stuffy lab as a researcher with a clipboard closely examined the readings from the diodes attached to their heads. This is all real humans taking psychedelics at home, at music festivals, or in the woods somewhere. The vast majority of the callers — 9,300 — were on psilocybin, a.k.a. magic mushrooms, the data found something incredibly odd: callers most likely to freak out during a trip weren’t on psychedelics. They were smoking run-of-the-mill marijuana.  

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Nearly half of all cannabis callers—47.2 percent—reached out to the hotline in an active state of pure panic. 70 percent of cannabis calls happened right in the middle of a bad high, where people taking MDMA or ketamine mostly called after the high wore off, asking a volunteer for “integration support” to help them make sense of what they were experiencing.

There’s a logic to it. Psychedelic users are often more experienced drug users. This isn’t their first rodeo. Marijuana is legal to some degree in much of the United States, and there are likely plenty of people trying it for the first time and maybe are unprepared for how preposterously potent it can be nowadays.

There are also 43 documented reports of “facilitator abuse,” where callers reported being dosed without consent in sketchy ayahuasca ceremonies.

Post-call surveys revealed that the single biggest factor determining whether a panicked caller got calmed down wasn’t medical intervention; it was whether the volunteer showed genuine, human empathy. Sometimes all you need when your brain is melting is a friendly voice reminding you that you aren’t going to die.

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Breathing is such an automatic function of our brains that we often take it for granted. We forget, or simply don’t know, how transformative it can be when done properly and with intention.

You can calm yourself, relieve anxiousness or anger, or, in the case of findings published in a real mouthful of a scientific journal, Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, it might even help you reach an altered mental state that’s a bit like the one you’d experience if you took psychedelics.

Presented at the ECNP Congress in Munich, researchers from Germany’s Central Institute of Mental Health shoved 30 experienced breathwork practitioners into an MRI machine to see what happens to the brain during continuous “circular breathing,” a technique used by musicians playing instruments like saxophones, trumpets, or trombones that allows them to continuously breathe in while breathing out into their instrument, thus cutting down on the need to stop and take a breath.

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The researchers found that global gray matter cerebral blood flow plummeted by about 45 percent. Cutting off 45 percent of blood flow in the brain sounds like it might kill you, but it does induce a lot of trippy side effects in the brain; it isn’t solely responsible for causing those trippy side effects.

Circular breathing was found to reshuffle the brain’s neural wiring, with participants reporting high-intensity altered states described as a deeply “oceanic” state in which they felt deeply connected to the universe. If that sounds a lot like the words of someone on LSD, you’re right. The effects are similar.

It was a small study, and there wasn’t a control group that was doing no breathwork at all, but researchers see it as a fascinating non-drug way to peer into the effects of psychedelic drugs. Breathing, after all, is free and doesn’t tick off the FDA.

Simple breathwork, when done properly, might be a nonpharmacological path for mental health treatments, considering how much LSD and psilocybin have been studied as potentially viable treatments for depression and PTSD.

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