What Happens to Your Nervous System During a Psychedelic Experience?
The short answer: a lot
Psychedelic experiences are undoubtedly profound. They allow us to access different states of consciousness that can catalyze remarkable insights, emotional breakthroughs, physical healing, and a deeper connection with ourselves and the collective Self. However, the intensity of these experiences often results in what is known as nervous system flooding—a state where the nervous system becomes overwhelmed by the rapid influx of sensory, emotional, and cognitive stimuli, making it impossible to process everything we’re experiencing—and that’s okay!
Psychedelic ceremonies aren’t meant for processing—they’re meant for feeling. But everything we feel and experience in an altered state still needs to be integrated into our waking consciousness (i.e., when we’re not tripping b***s), so that the insights we gain can be anchored in the body and accessed when we actually need them. This is where Somatic Experiencing offers a unique advantage: it provides a powerful, body-based approach to integrating these altered states in a way that’s sustainable, embodied, and real.
Understanding Nervous System Flooding
Nervous system flooding refers to the body's response to an overload of stimuli—maybe you’ve felt frozen or unable to think during a heated argument, had a panic attack in response to stress, or become overwhelmed by intense emotions and sensations during a breathwork journey or psychedelic experience. (Anyone who has journeyed with Ayahuasca knows the feeling of being absolutely overwhelmed and physically immobilized—that’s flooding.)
Picture your nervous system as a river—under normal conditions, it flows smoothly and steadily, managing everyday stressors and emotions. However, during a psychedelic experience, this river can transform into a raging torrent, where the volume of water (stimuli) becomes too much for the riverbanks (your nervous system) to contain.
This flooding can result in overwhelming emotions, sensations, and even visions or memories during the experience, leading to a state of hyper-arousal or hypo-arousal. During or after ceremony, you might experience hyper-arousal as anxiety, restlessness, ruminations/thought-loops, or an inability to calm down, while hypo-arousal can present as numbness, dissociation, disconnection, or a sense of being "frozen" or stuck.
Feeling ungrounded after a psychedelic journey?
When your nervous system floods, your body doesn't just need insight—it needs support. This is why integration is more than journaling or “thinking it through.” We need to work with the body directly, helping the nervous system process what it couldn’t at the time.
Somatic Experiencing®, a body-based trauma therapy, supports this by allowing you to gently complete those unfinished survival responses—whether that's fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It helps your system come back into balance, so the medicine’s message doesn’t just stay trapped in your mind or body, but becomes something you can live, embody, and grow from.
If you’ve had a psychedelic experience that left you feeling ungrounded, fragmented, or emotionally flooded, psychedelic integration therapy can help. You don’t have to make sense of it all on your own. Through somatic integration work, you can begin to regulate your system, embody your insights, and truly heal.
