Quite a few people including myself are constantly experiencing hangovers after smoking DMT, taking Mushrooms or Ayahuasca. It manifests itself as tiredness, dizzyness and very often a very extreme headache. I'm wondering if someone has speculations to offer why that is. I tried:

-Drinking a lot of water
-Taking Vitamins
-Eating
-Coffee

Nothing really seems to work. Some have suggested that it could be muscles tensing up during the trip, but i get hungover from really small amounts like 0.3g mushrooms. My latest theory was, that the visuals somehow strain the eyes...but with 0.3g mushrooms, there are no visuals. So i'm thinking it might be psychological or there are biochemical processes at play which are not researched - potentially dangerous (?) ....

Isn't that primary due to vasoconstriction?

I get it more with phenylethylamines. Taking cayenne pepper in capsules helps. I also try to get a lot of antioxidants to counter the large release of free radicals

Not sure obli, I don't get a hangover from trytamines..usually its more of the opposite. I do sometimes feel pretty out of it the day after a really high dose of ayahuasca/pharma though, but thats due to the harmalas and not really the dmt (since a high dose of harmalas alone can do that to me)

Usually the only time i feel drained the day after tripping is if it was a rough and tiresome/challenging experience. Even if i only sleep a few hours (or sometimes none), i often feel awesome the next day

Edit -removed

Blessings
~ND

I don't ever get this from smoking DMT. I can get a bit of sleep deprivation or exhaustion after mushrooms and ayahuasca and cacti if I take them at night because I don't sleep enough. I can be a bit sore sometimes after mushrooms from getting into all kinds of weird positions, because I tend to crawl around and bend my neck all weird.

Full doses of harmalas have given me pretty crazy hangovers a few times though. Sometimes I am still dizzy with tracers and a headache the next day. This only happens after a certain dose. Higher doses also seem to be able to go for well over 12 hours for me. Yawning like crazy with a weird fuzzy feeling in my head can accompany this. I don't like it. I make sure I can sleep for like 10 hours after I take full doses of harmalas now..and I very rarely do take that much harmalas now. Oral DMT has become less frequent in my life. I like to dose low on harmalas and snuff DMT. Mostly I smoke DMT right now.

Drink lots of water, get sufficient carbs/protein/fats and make sure to sleep enough after.

I feel like you have to have enough energy to begin with to really do this work. Otherwise you feel drained after. It still might be healing or good for you, but you have to realize that requiring rest after is only logical..especially if you already suffer with chronic fatigue issues.

The longer experiences will really burn up your blood glucose levels.

well after smoking dmt I sometimes feel pretty tired, but I wouldn't call it a hangover, its more like how I feel after I have just had sex. I feel good but lazy. I usually eat fruit and drink water afterwards and in no time I am back to normal. Regarding oral route I pretty much agree with everyones else here.

Are you smoking just freebase? Because I feel minimal hangover after freebase only experience. Harmalas and or long journeys make me exhausted but this is to be expected I think as with any lengthy endeavor.

I can speak on mushrooms giving me a headache/drained the next day. One time after doing about 4.5 g, I had a headache so bad I woke up in the middle of the night with it and had it late into the afternoon the next day. Though to be fair, I had almost heat-stroked hiking around that trip. But even on non-physically-trying experiences, I have had effects like these. Often I get a bad headache, bleary eyes and uncontrollable yawns after coming down.. but not the next day. The next day I'm sometimes pretty tired too. I have hypothesized that it could be due to lots of light entering your eye because of pupil dilation? - the headache that is. I live in a very sunny area. But I suppose that theory would be contradicted by other pupil-dilating compounds that are not tryptamines.
I imagine it has something to do with the other alkaloids like baeocystin and whatnot.
As for DMT, I've never really had negative effects.

I usually just try and get lots of rest and eat well the next day.

I wonder if serotonin receptor agonism imparted by DMT and psilocin/psilocybin is responsible by inducing symptoms which are along the lines of a migrainous process.

There seems to be some connection between migraines and the serotonin system.

I've never tried it, but I have heard from a number of different people that serotonin agonists are good for headaches. We've all heard of the cluster headache thing, but it apparently works on migraines as well.

I have been told that a microdose of mushrooms is great for any kind of headache, and also is a good cure for an alcohol induced hangover. (Which is something I intend to try when I get back to school )

I wonder if the hallucinatory aspects of migraine and psychedelics are at all the same. From personal experience, the quality of a migraine aura hallucination has similar characteristics to the kind of CEV you get on a low dose of mushrooms.

My 2c
~ND

I too have experienced this "hangover" however, I only recall experiencing it if I'm physically "imbalanced".

In other words, when I eat closer to nature- less processed foods, more plants, more pure water, fresh air, and physical exercise, I feel great after tripping. Definite afterglow.

On the other hand if I've been lazy and/or over-indulging in food that physically weakens me, I will be extra-in-tune, extra-sensitive with the sensual, physical after-effects of those foods when I'm coming off of a trip.

Mind/Body/Spirit

It's all one.

Balance and moderation in life is the Warriors Path.

(Not to imply that you're being lazy/overindulging, I only offer my personal experience).

Agreed with the observations so far.

I often suffered from migraines, triggered by muscular or nervous tension. The only effective treatments seemed to go the brute force route, strong analgesics plus benzos, and triptans, like zolmitriptan. What I learned about their mechanism of action as 5HT agonists was yet another reason to be interested in tryptamines.

So I was pleasantly surprised, but not shocked, when DMT and 4-HO-DMT did help a LOT with migrainous headaches, and generally left my head feeling tip top.

Harmalas seem to be a different story, though, and I've found a very close relation between my previous general state (diet, physical and mental shape) and their effects during and after the experience. The few times I've felt hungover after harmalas, the reasons were made clear to me even during the effects: take better care of yourself, or the underlying problems will be amplified.

So definitely I would try to improve my diet, exercise, meditate, etc.

Could be a number of reasons , over stimulation , sensory burnout, physical strain.
I cant take acid anymore after about 4 hours I get very tired and tense limbs that only ketamine was able to ease.
After some p.torch I had the worst headache at roughly hour 11 but a likely contributor was dehydration as the cacti loves drinking your water!

I've got some pretty bad hangover type symtoms
The next day after an intense travel session .
Quite a few really bad headaches. I've found a hot
Pack on the head does wonders for a bad headache .

I've suspected food interactions with harmalas in the past with myself .

hello

my 2 cents

any type of visoconstrictor (coffee) should be avoided, your body just went through severe nervous stress, your heart rate went through the roof, adding a constrictor post the event will only shoot your blood pressure and keep the needed nutrients away from the nerves that need to recover in your limbs.

most all the "hangovers" i have seen are when people went and had there core temperature elevated too high, sure you can pace around, or talking inanely or jumping up and down, good exercise, but the hangovers under what limited information i have, can be attributed to either stress or nutrient depletion (the latter of which is a bit debatable), but not the stress over a deadline, but nervous stress.

in short the best cure i can thing of is one of the two following

A) enjoy it, because despite the pain it causes, once you acclimatize it makes the toil seem more rewarding. to this effect try to keep your body temperature down and stay out of interaction with others, find a nice cold solid hole to curl up inside and stay there.

B) if option a is not acceptable, they you might want to try a lick of the dog (low dose) or if that fails the following.

get a glass, a bottle of high proof alcohol (port wine is great for this), pour a small amount in, warm it with your hands and breathe deep in the smell of aged oak and berries.

dont drink, the intent of this is to cause visodilation.

short of that the next best options are to take a low dose of harmalas or to eat some chocolate, if you have entire nubs around that is what you want, the bitter the better unless its made into bars, in which care just eat the entire thing, you will only need 1-3 nibs if they are raw and you should be feeling better pretty fast.

one other option, and this goes into the debated stuff from before, a sudden drop in the reserves of choline in your body because your nervous system suddenly need it can do some strange things, licithin and racetams (piracetam, aniracetam and noopept) have done me great things

also unrelated but possible problem (given aya can has so much in it) you may be having an allergic response to one of the inhibitors, try to test it on its own and see what happens.


TL;DR GO TAKE A COLD SHOWER AND FIND THE COLDEST PLACE YOU CAN FIND TO CURL UP IN. IF AFTER AN HOUR YOUR NOT BETTER THEN LICK THE DOG THAT BIT YOU, AND IF AFTER ANOTHER HOUR YOUR STILL NOT BETTER GO EAT SOMETHING THAT IS A VISO DILATOR AND SOMETHING THAT IS AN ANTI-INFLAMTORY,

good luck.

I usually only get the hangover feeling if I take it late and I'm up all night. I attribute that completely to sleep deprivation though.

I find it fascinating to the extent we are all wired differently. Even with cannabis, you find those who smoke a certain overboard level and have a freaky psychedelic breakthough, some just get nausea and stop smoking for a bit, some hit a wall and don't get higher, some just curl up and go to sleep.

I'm one who has the opposite of a hangover with tryptamines, I get quite a boost of energy and mood for the next few days.

Roland Griffiths acknowledged observing this headache effect in his studies at a talk he gave at Burning Man and said they hadn't found any evidence of negative/destructive processes correlating with it (iirc ). It would be good to look through the hopkins publications and see if this is written up somewhere in there.

One thing that helps for me is meditation after trips. All of the energy i deal with when i trip sometimes burns me out by the end of the night and in a way it helps me pull the pieces of my psyche back together... hard to explain really but it works. Any form of meditation will do although what i like to do is imagine myself wrapping a band aid around my head.

How about taking niacin [ a vascodiolater].. before smoking DMT..
I wonder if it may help some?

That's interesting to ponder on. I'd hate to get a niacin flush while I smoke spice though.