What separates humans from animals is the ability to choose our response to things.
Viktor Frankl discovered this in the most extreme conditions imaginable. Surviving Nazi concentration camps, he found that even when everything else is stripped away, one freedom remains: the freedom to choose what an experience means. We get to decide how we frame things. Something that appears bad, we can reframe and give meaning to as part of a bigger story.
This is the power of religion, too. Belief in God offers a larger reference point ("God's plan") that makes suffering tolerable.
I broke my kneecap recently. It hurt, and I was furious at everything I wouldn't be doing for the next three months. Then I remembered breaking my wrist fifteen years ago. Six weeks off work, which I spent applying for freelance jobs online. One of which I got. Which led to leaving my job, travelling the world, and eventually starting my own business.
Breaking my wrist was, without question, a blessing. So maybe breaking my knee is one too. That's how I'm choosing to see it. Time to focus on projects I've been too busy to touch. And maybe one of those projects leads somewhere. Maybe it will change my life in ways I can’t imagine.
So where do mushrooms come into this?
Choosing how you respond, reframing your experiences, these things require a shift in perspective. But sometimes that shift is hard to access. The grooves of habitual thinking run deep.
Eat a few grams of psilocybin mushrooms, however, and perspective change becomes difficult to avoid.
Psilocybin turns down the ego, loosens entrenched thought patterns, and dissolves your sense of a fixed, separate self. You feel a oneness with the world. A connectedness with everyone and everything. And from that vantage point, your life looks completely different.
Loved ones feel precious. Grudges feel absurd. Addictions and attachments look childish, and you find yourself genuinely puzzled that you couldn't see this before. Your whole life gets reframed in a couple of hours.
But it doesn't last.
The insights and feelings fade. What psilocybin actually does is open a window of relaxed beliefs, a period of increased cognitive flexibility where the usual rules don't apply quite so rigidly. Lasting change only happens if you capitalise on that window.
This is where psychotherapy, meditation, journalling, and breathwork become incredibly powerful as ways of locking in what it showed you.
The reframe goes deeper than you might think
The "Stoned Ape" Hypothesis proposes that early hominids consuming psilocybin mushrooms experienced a rapid expansion in brain capacity, contributing to the development of complex language, self-reflection, and social behaviour.
Psychedelic use is also thought to have played a role in the formation of early Christian thought and the development of western civilisational values.
Reframes don't get much bigger than that.
And it's not just psilocybin
Fungi, as a kingdom, are the ultimate reframers.
They break down complex organic matter (and, remarkably, plastics, radioactive material, and crude oil), turning what we call waste into the raw material for new life.
They reframe death not as an endpoint, but as a necessary step in the renewal of life. The rotting log isn't dying. It's becoming something else.
Ask anyone working closely with fungi and you'll hear a version of the same shift: from feeling separate from nature, to feeling like a participant in something deeply interconnected and reciprocal.
Then there are functional mushrooms. Lion's Mane, Reishi, Cordyceps. These operate as adaptogens, helping the body adapt to stress rather than simply suppressing the symptoms of it. Even the approach to health gets reframed: from fighting to adapting. From resistance to resilience.
If you're stuck in a rut, know that change is possible. And if you need help changing your perspective, you know where to look.