Cognitive Integration: 5 Strategies to Gain Insight Into Your Own Mind

The psychedelic experience can be powerful, healing, and transformative. 

It can give you new insight into how your mind works, how you relate to yourself and to the world, and how environmental or contextual triggers initiate different responses and behaviors in you.

 There are a range of approaches for integration, such as the:

• Physical
• ‍Emotional‍
• Existential or spiritual
• Relationship-based

Below we’ll focus on tools and techniques for mental and cognitive integration.

Stream-of-consciousness journaling

What you do in the days, weeks, months, and years after psychedelic therapy sessions are what help to create long-lasting, life-transforming behaviors.

One of the most valuable cognitive tools you have access to is journaling. 

‍Stream-of-consciousness journaling is simply writing down whatever surfaces in your mind, without editing, as it arises. It’s a uniquely powerful tool in the psychedelic integration process.

An alternative approach that achieves the same outcome is recording voice memos to yourself. Speaking out loud and recording this onto your phone or similar.

Benefits of integrative journaling

Journaling helps you understand in real-time, and day-by-day, how you’re feeling. It surfaces what is present in your awareness, allowing your emotions, thoughts, dreams, and desires to flow from within yourself onto the paper.

It is easy to overlook how powerful it is to take something from your mind and translate it into linear language. It often lives as a fuzzy amalgamation of thoughts, memories, images, sounds, and metaphors.

Journaling tips

Begin by finding a quiet, comfortable space (if possible). Start with an empty notebook page. This practice helps to prevent any noise or distraction that may interfere or influence the process.

Begin to write whatever wants to surface.

If you’d like some help getting started, you can consider using these prompts:

• “Today, I feel ‘X’, because…”
• “The past few days have been…”
• “One thing I appreciate right now is…”
• “I’ve been thinking a lot about…”

Making a regular stream-of-consciousness journaling practice, particularly in the days following a psychedelic medicine session, is a foundational cognitive integration tool.

Life audits and clean-ups

Psychedelics are not a panacea: a magic pill that simply fixes everything in your life, and guides you towards everlasting bliss. There is real, sometimes challenging work to be done both inside and outside of the medicine sessions.

Another powerful cognitive integration tool is to do a “life audit.” Based on the results of your audit, you’ll want to conduct any associated clean-up or organization of your life.

A life audit simply means setting aside time to make an honest, high-level assessment of your life at that moment.

This provides a clear picture of your present, and clarity on where you’d like to be, or what you want your life to look like. 

Benefits of life audits

If there is something “out of place” after your life audits, such as unwanted relationships, outstanding debt, or a lack of physical activity —you can list clear steps you will take to “clean up.”

While you may be eager to translate these insights into actions immediately, it’s healthy to sit with the thoughts and feelings that arise before making any major decisions. 

Journaling, as mentioned above, is helpful in committing and processing insights in the short term, which can carry into a deeper life audit.

“Nothing needs to be rushed into here,” Mindbloom Clinician Chelsea Tersavich says, “It’s important to rest after a psychedelic experience, particularly as it relates to major life changes.”

Life audit tips

Approach life audits with self-preservation and the intent to grow as a person. These should be honest assessments of what is or isn’t working in your life.

Questions to ask yourself may be:

• What exactly is my financial situation? Is it my desired financial situation? 
• How is my personal health? How would I like it to be different? 
• What’s the state of my relationships? Do I have friends I can count on, and who are happy to see me? How are things going with my partner?
• What hobbies do I enjoy doing? Which activities fulfill me outside of working hours? Am I making space for them in my life?

This is real integration work in practice: assessing where you are, envisioning where you want to be based on your experiences, and taking aligned action in a positive direction. 

Conducting a life audit is a powerful tool for cognitive integration after a psychedelic medicine session.

Working with a care team or therapist

Your mind has an almost unfathomable depth. 

The further into yourself you explore, the further the path extends in front of you. It can seem daunting, overwhelming, or sometimes impossible to understand the fullness of your psychedelic experiences, and unpack their meaning by yourself. 

Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be something you do all by yourself. There is external, third-party support you can lean on. 

Traditional therapeutic modalities such as somatic therapy or talk psychotherapy can be  powerful cognitive integration tools. Working with a licensed therapist or care team are helpful tools for cognitive integration of psychedelic experiences. 

These methods help you deeply understand yourself, and the insights gained in your medicine sessions. This helps create a path forward to making tangible, real change in your day-to-day experiences. 

If you don’t have access to therapists or a care team, intentional conversations with friends or loved ones who hold space for you can be just as powerful.

The 5 whys

Sometimes, during a session or in the time that follows, you are presented with a particularly difficult experience or emotion. It may be hard to understand, and not obvious why it happened, what it means, what you’re supposed to do with it. 

The “5 Whys'' uses question-based prompts to find a root cause. It consists of simply asking “why?” to each answer you are able to give around your experiences. It’s a cognitive tool to find the root cause of any given experience, emotion, or self-confrontation.

An example of the 5 Whys 

Here’s an example of how the 5 Whys can help you find the root cause of an issue or experience:
‍

1. “Why did this particular memory cause me to become emotional?”

It reminded me of a past mistake.

‍
2. Why is this past mistake so important?

I hurt the feelings of someone I love.

3. Why did you hurt their feelings?

I overreacted to something they told me to do.

‍

4. Why did you overreact?

I felt like they were trying to control me.

‍

5. Why is control so important to you?

I don’t feel like I have many areas of my life under control.

‍

Through this exercise, you unlock new levels of understanding and insight. Though this is not always an easy task.

For more complicated or emotionally-charged material, it may take some time to begin this practice. And that is okay: Integration is not a race to the end, it is an ongoing process.

Following hobbies, passions, and curiosities

A happy, healthy mind is also a playful, curious, and engaged mind.

Asha Urban, Mindbloom’s Guide Lead, recommends simply trying something new!

“Immerse yourself in something you’ve never done before, and expand the horizons of what is possible for you,” she says. “Taking dance is a particularly powerful practice, as it forms new neural pathways, challenges your comfort zones, and is great for your physical health.”

If you feel called to focus on mental and cognitive integration, make sure that you are following your interests, pursuing your passions, and chasing your creativity and curiosity. 

Doing this is as much physical as it is emotional, mental, and even spiritual for many. It makes you “lean into” life. There is a magic in genuine excitement, and it is a powerful integration tool and technique for you and your journey. 

Takeaways

Cognitive integration is a core component of continuing to “do the work” after psychedelic medicine experiences. 

It’s not always glorious nor glamorous, but taking a loving, hard look at your life sows the seeds of lasting change. 

Powerful exercises worth considering are stream-of-consciousness journaling, life audits, therapeutic conversations, the 5 whys, and following your curiosity.