The Two Things That Actually Fixed My Brain

Two years ago, I lay on my friend’s floor with an eye mask on, five grams of dried mushrooms deep into the most terrifying and clarifying day of my life. At some point during those hours (I couldn’t tell you exactly when) I decided I was done smoking. I tried to quit countless times before. But this time it stuck.

During the height of my trip, I had the distinct experience of being an early human, running through a primal world with my small tribe, completely immersed in the environment and connected to my fellow humans. It all felt incredibly ancient and visceral.

Once the mushrooms had worn off, I went for a run and felt that same feeling. Although I was running through a modern city, I was in touch with a deep archetype of the human experience.

I still microdose regularly. A few weeks back I took a low dose and went for a long hike in the countryside. There’s nothing I’ve found that quite matches that combination of movement, fresh air, the soft amplification of perception that a microdose brings. Everything feels connected and I feel connected to everything. The brain quiets, the body warms up, and all anxieties and worries are left behind.

These two things – psilocybin and exercise – have been so beneficial for my mental health that I think everyone should know about it.

I’m telling you this because a new paper published in Discover Mental Health in early 2026, authored by Nicholas Fabiano and colleagues including psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris, has made what I’ve felt in my own body into a formal scientific argument. And it’s worth understanding why.

The paper is titled The combination of exercise and psychedelics for the treatment of major depressive disorder. It’s a commentary, meaning it synthesises existing evidence rather than presenting new trial data, but the argument it makes is coherent, detailed, and hugely important in this day and age.

Depression statistics are grim. Roughly 290 million people globally live with major depressive disorder, and around half of them don’t respond to the standard treatments of antidepressants and therapy. Both exercise and psychedelic-assisted therapy have each demonstrated, independently, efficacy comparable to first-line medical treatment. Yet nobody has formally studied what happens when you combine them.

Fabiano’s team asked the question: what if these two things are more effective when used together?

The case they build operates on both the biological and psychological levels – which, as modern research is proving, are two sides of the same coin.

The neurotrophic hypothesis of depression suggests that the disorder is partly a story of the brain losing its ability to renew and rewire itself. BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) is the molecule most central to this renewal. Think of it as fertiliser for neural connections. Depression is associated with deficits in it. Recovery, in many forms, involves restoring it.

What the paper highlights is that exercise and psychedelics boost BDNF through entirely different mechanisms, which means they’re covering different ground and potentially reinforcing each other’s effects.

The authors suggest exercise may supply more BDNF to “mediate the enhanced receptor sensitivity from psychedelics, maximizing downstream effects” – essentially priming the brain to get more from a psychedelic experience, and then sustaining the gains afterwards.

There’s more. Psychedelics drive neuroplasticity largely in the cortex (the higher-order thinking regions) with only modest effects in the hippocampus. Exercise does the opposite: it specifically boosts hippocampal neurogenesis, actually increasing the physical size of that structure over time. Together, the coverage becomes brain-wide in a way that neither achieves alone.

The paper also points to something fascinating about the default mode network, which is the brain’s resting state circuitry, heavily implicated in rumination and depressive thought patterns. Psychedelics temporarily disrupt the overactive connectivity between the hippocampus and the DMN. Exercise, over time, normalises that connectivity. The authors propose that the temporary disruption induced by psychedelics may break rigid, maladaptive patterns, while consistent exercise consolidates the healthy rewiring that follows.

If you spend any time thinking about mental health from a first-principles perspective (beyond the neurotransmitter-deficiency model that dominated psychiatry for decades) you keep arriving at cellular energy. The brain consumes roughly 20% of the body’s energy despite being 2% of its mass. Neurons are extraordinarily metabolically demanding. And mitochondrial dysfunction (the failure of cells to produce and regulate energy efficiently) is increasingly understood to be a core mechanism in depression, not a downstream symptom of it.

Exercise is the most potent non-pharmacological intervention we have for mitochondrial health. It drives mitochondrial biogenesis (the creation of new mitochondria) improves their efficiency, reduces oxidative stress, and enhances the brain’s capacity to manage its own energy demands. This is part of why consistent exercise genuinely changes the architecture of depression, rather than just providing a temporary mood lift. It’s metabolic medicine.

The paper adds an interesting dimension here. In rodent models, exercise was shown to mitigate MDMA-induced mitochondrial dysfunction, reducing oxidative stress and improving cognitive outcomes. This suggests that exercise may actually protect and enhance the cellular environment in which psychedelic-induced changes take place.

This connects to something broader about how we tend to think about mental health interventions. We treat the brain as if it floats independently of the body. But the brain is a metabolic organ, deeply sensitive to energy availability, inflammation, oxidative stress, and the overall condition of the system it depends on. Exercise, sleep, nutrition, and certain compounds like psilocybin, all interact with that system at a biological level. The idea that we can effectively treat depression without addressing metabolic health is starting to look like one of medicine’s more expensive mistakes.

One of the more counterintuitive things I’ve noticed after working with psilocybin – and many others do, too – is that I’ve become more motivated to take care of myself physically. It’s like the internal resistance to exercise simply reduced. Especially on a low dose, I want to go outside. I wanted to feel my body working.

The paper documents this pattern systematically. People who use psychedelics, across multiple studies, report increases in physical activity. Ayahuasca users are typically more physically active than non-users. In studies where participants reduced their use of alcohol or other substances after psychedelic experiences, a substantial number also reported increases in exercise. In one psilocybin therapy trial for depression, qualitative data found that roughly half the sample reported improvements to diet and exercise habits.

The proposed mechanisms for this are psychologically coherent. Psychedelics reduce what researchers call psychological rigidity – the entrenched patterns of thought and behaviour that keep us stuck in the same loops. They increase openness. And since sedentary, low-energy lifestyles are partly maintained by psychological rigidity, dissolving some of that rigidity naturally creates space for different behaviours.

Self-determination theory – the psychological framework about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation – is another lens the authors use here. Psychedelics appear to increase the internal, autonomous sense of motivation that makes lasting behaviour change possible, rather than the brittle, willpower-dependent kind that usually collapses under stress. Low energy and anhedonia are among the most stubborn barriers to exercise in people with depression. If psychedelics can shift the motivational architecture, even temporarily, that window becomes enormously valuable.

There’s something the paper touches on only briefly that deserves more attention. Studies combining psychedelics with mindfulness-based exercise and nature contact have shown amplification of motivation and reductions in rumination and negative affect. This matches what I’ve found consistently: a microdose hike in open landscape is among the most reliably effective things I’ve discovered for my own mental health.

The research here is converging from three directions simultaneously. Time in nature reduces cortisol, lowers default mode network activity, and restores directed attention capacity. These are the same networks that are dysregulated in depression.

Meditation, particularly mindfulness practices, produces measurable changes in brain structure and function that overlap with what exercise and psychedelics each produce separately. And psychedelics, at their core, seem to work in part by temporarily dissolving the rigid self-referential processing that keeps depression in place, allowing the nervous system to settle into something closer to its natural state.

When you combine movement, nature, and a modest dose of psilocybin, you’re stacking three interventions that all, through different mechanisms, point the brain in the same direction. The science is building toward the same conclusion.

There’s something bigger here. The combination of exercise and psychedelics represents a kind of health sovereignty that doesn’t fit neatly into the pharmaceutical model. Neither requires a prescription in most contexts. Both are relatively accessible. Both have safety profiles that compare favourably to chronic antidepressant use. And both work, at least in part, by restoring the body and brain’s own capacity for self-regulation rather than overriding that capacity with an exogenous chemical signal.

The neurotrophic hypothesis of depression, which this paper builds on, frames the disorder as a failure of biological renewal, of the brain’s ability to maintain and rebuild itself. Viewed through this lens, the interventions that work best aren’t the ones that correct a chemical imbalance. They’re the ones that restore the conditions under which biological regeneration becomes possible again. Exercise is metabolic medicine. Psilocybin is, among other things, a neuroplasticity catalyst. Together, they create an environment in which the brain can start doing what it’s designed to do.

That reframing is vital because it puts the locus of health back inside the person rather than inside the prescription. It suggests that the question worth asking isn’t “what drug corrects this deficit” but “what conditions does this brain need to heal itself?” The answer, increasingly, looks like movement, connection, neuroplasticity, metabolic flexibility, and occasionally a profound disruption of the patterns that have kept everything stuck.

Two years ago, on the floor in the dark, I stopped smoking that night. I started moving. I started playing football for the first time since I was in my twenties. I still lift. I still microdose. My mental health has changed in profound ways.

The science is there, we just need to spread the word.

Reference: Fabiano N, Stubbs B, Lawrence DW, et al. The combination of exercise and psychedelics for the treatment of major depressive disorder. Discover Mental Health. 2026;6:37. doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00408-5