Social Anxiety and Three Low-Dose Sessions

I have had social anxiety for as long as I can remember. Not paralyzing — I function, I hold a job that involves people, I have friends — but a constant tax on energy and attention, a background hum of evaluation and threat-detection in social situations that exhausts me. I've done CBT, an SSRI (stopped after 18 months due to side effects), mindfulness practice. All helpful. None sufficient.

I did three psilocybin sessions over four months, all low-dose, all at home, all solo (with a friend on call). Here's an honest accounting.

Session 1 — 1.2g

Gentle. Mostly visual — some texture enhancement, music becoming more dimensional. The anxiety itself went quiet for about 90 minutes. Not addressed, not processed, just — absent. That quiet was itself notable. I had forgotten what it was like to not be monitoring.

Session 2 — 1.5g

I set an intention: find the thing underneath the social anxiety, not manage its symptoms. That intention went somewhere I didn't expect. I found myself revisiting a specific memory from middle school — not dramatic, not traumatic in the clinical sense, but formative. The moment when I learned that my instinct to be fully myself was socially costly. I watched that 12-year-old make a decision to become smaller, and understood that I had been mostly honoring that decision ever since.

I don't want to overclaim the therapeutic significance of a single memory in a low-dose experience. But it was real, and it provided material for three very productive therapy sessions afterwards.

Session 3 — 1.5g

Integration rather than excavation. Something had shifted enough that this session felt like consolidation — revisiting what Session 2 had surfaced from a more stable position. Wrote for four hours afterward. The writing was the most useful thing I've done in the whole process.

Six months out: The social anxiety is not gone. It is lessened. More importantly, my relationship with it has changed — I understand its origin more clearly and that understanding has some effect on its grip. I now regard it as something I carry, not something I am. That's meaningful, even if the symptom persists.