Can Mushrooms Make You a Better Person?
The peer-reviewed research on empathy, openness, and lasting personality change after psilocybin is more compelling than you might expect — and more complicated than the headlines suggest.
It’s one of the oldest claims in the psychedelic playbook, and one of the most suspicious-sounding: people come back from a trip different. Softer. More curious. Kinder to strangers on the subway. Less likely to lose their temper over nothing. More likely to call their parents.
The cynic’s response is obvious. Of course people say that. People say a lot of things after an intense experience. Confirmation bias, expectation, the warm glow of a good weekend. None of it means anything actually changed.
Except the research keeps finding that something actually changed.
Not for everyone. Not always dramatically. Not in the way a self-help book would promise. But measurably, replicably, and sometimes for a very long time.
Here’s what the science actually says.
Part I: The Openness Finding That Surprised Researchers
Personality psychologists have long held that core personality traits are essentially fixed in adults past the age of thirty. The Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) are considered among the most stable measures in psychology. They don’t move much. Therapy can nudge them. Major life events can shift them. But a single discrete experience producing meaningful, lasting change? That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Then a landmark Johns Hopkins study published in 2011 found that a single high-dose psilocybin session produced significant increases in openness, and that those increases were still measurable over a year later.
Openness is the personality trait most associated with curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, imagination, and tolerance for ambiguity. It’s the trait that predicts creative thinking, intellectual flexibility, and the capacity to revise your beliefs when presented with new evidence. In other words, it’s the trait that makes someone easier to be around, easier to reason with, and more likely to grow.
The participants who showed the greatest increases in openness were those who reported having a mystical experience during their session, a feeling of unity, transcendence, or deep meaning. Those who had a more ordinary psychological experience showed less change. The depth of the experience appeared to be the mechanism. The drug was the door. What happened inside determined how far open it swung.
Part II: Neuroticism Goes Down. Empathy Goes Up.
Openness isn’t the only trait that moves.
A 2024 study published in ScienceDirect found significant reductions in neuroticism one month after a single high-dose psilocybin session. Neuroticism is the personality trait associated with anxiety, emotional instability, and negative affect, and it’s one of the strongest predictors of poor mental health outcomes and difficult interpersonal relationships. Less neuroticism means less reactivity, less rumination, less tendency to interpret neutral events as threatening.
In plain English: people reported getting less easily wound up. And the effect lasted.
On the empathy side, a randomized controlled trial from the University of Zurich published in 2024 found that depressed patients who received a single dose of psilocybin showed significant improvements in explicit emotional empathy compared to a placebo group, with the effect persisting for at least two weeks. A separate study found that psilocybin enhanced both divergent thinking and emotional empathy the morning after use, with improvements in well-being still measurable seven days later.
The mechanism behind the empathy increase connects back to what we know about how psilocybin affects the brain, specifically its effect on the amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection system. Psilocybin reduces amygdala reactivity to negative stimuli. When the threat alarm is quieter, there’s more cognitive and emotional bandwidth available for other people. Fear and empathy, it turns out, compete for the same resources.
Part III: Psilocybin vs. Antidepressants on Personality Change
Here’s a comparison that rarely makes it into mainstream coverage.
A phase 2 clinical trial comparing psilocybin therapy to escitalopram, one of the most commonly prescribed SSRIs for depression, found that psilocybin produced significantly greater changes in openness and extraversion than the antidepressant, while both reduced neuroticism. SSRIs have their own documented effects on personality, mostly through reducing neuroticism and emotional blunting. But they don’t appear to produce the increases in openness that psilocybin consistently generates.
This matters because openness isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the trait most associated with personal growth, adaptability, and the willingness to change, which is after all what most people seeking therapy are after.
One way to think about it: SSRIs can turn down the volume on distress. Psilocybin appears to also turn up the signal on curiosity.
Part IV: The Honest Complications
None of this means psilocybin reliably makes every person measurably better. The research is real, but so are the caveats.
Most of the studies showing personality change involve guided, supported sessions, not solo trips on a couch with a playlist. Set and setting matter enormously, and the therapeutic container, the intention, the preparation, the integration afterward, appears to be part of what produces lasting change. Stripping those elements out and just taking the drug doesn’t reliably produce the same outcomes.
The research also shows that the depth of the experience matters. Participants who had what researchers call a complete mystical experience showed far greater increases in openness than those who had a mild or purely cognitive trip. You can’t engineer that. You can create conditions that make it more likely. You cannot guarantee it.
And then there’s the question of what “better” even means. More open, less neurotic, more empathetic: these are improvements on most people’s definition. But a 2025 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry noted that psilocybin can also produce profound shifts in identity, values, and worldview that participants themselves sometimes describe as disorienting. A revised sense of what matters, which relationships feel meaningful, which parts of their previous life felt hollow. That’s not necessarily bad. But it’s not neutral either.
Better is complicated. The research says psilocybin moves people in directions that most psychologists would consider adaptive. What that looks like in any individual life is a different question.
Part V: What This Actually Means in Practice
The studies aren’t describing magic. They’re describing a molecule that, under the right conditions, appears to temporarily loosen the brain’s most entrenched patterns, allowing for flexibility, integration, and change in ways that normal waking consciousness tends to resist.
We’ve written before about why the second trip feels so different from the first, and a big part of that is what the first trip did to you. The openness increase is real. The reduced neuroticism is real. The person sitting down for their second experience is genuinely not the same person who sat down the first time, in ways that show up in personality assessments a year later.
That’s not a small thing.
Personality change in adults, real, lasting, measured personality change, is one of the hardest things to produce in all of psychology. Decades of therapy can do it. Major life events can do it. Apparently, under the right conditions, a single afternoon can do it too.
The question of whether that makes mushrooms a tool for becoming a better person is ultimately yours to answer. The question of whether they measurably change who you are has, at this point, a fairly clear answer.
They do.
A Note on Safe and Intentional Use
The research consistently points to the same factors: preparation, a supportive environment, and integration afterward. The experience alone isn’t the medicine. It’s the experience plus what you do with it.
If you’re curious about exploring microdosing as a gentler starting point, our Magically Microdosed Gummies are a thoughtful, well-dosed option. For those interested in the full range of what we offer, browse our mushroom product collection here.
Trip safely, know your source, and respect the experience. Visit SmilesHigh.Club for more.
