#150: ššµš½ Can Psychedelics Slow, or Even Reverse, Aging?
And, let's celebrate 3 years of Nina's Notes! š„³
Hey Friends,
This week marks a big milestone: 150 editions and the three-year anniversary of Ninaās Notes.
When I started this newsletter, I wanted a space to translate complex science into something clear and human.
Three years later, weāve explored everything from sleep and stress to psychedelics and neuroplasticity, together with 3000 readers around the world.
Thank you for being here!!
Whether youāve read since edition #1 or joined last week, hereās to the next 150!
As Ninaās Notes moves into Year Four, my goal is to go deeper.
I will be going beyond just reporting on the science of health and longevity, but also sharing my own perspective, experiments, and conversations with the people shaping these fields.
If the past three years were about building a foundation, year four will be about expanding the conversation. More interviews, more ideas from the cutting edge, more questions that donāt have simple answers.
Thank you for reading, for sharing, and for reminding me every week why this work matters.
Hereās to another year of discovering what longevity really means, together.
Love of love from Lisbon,
šNina
P.S. I recorded this episode with video - watch it here!
š¬ In this note:
ššµš½ Can Psychedelics Slow, or Even Reverse, Aging?
š Killer Potential
ā”ļø Humans Are Closer Genetically To Mushrooms Than Plants
#150: ššµš½ Can Psychedelics Slow, or Even Reverse, Aging?
This article was also presented as a talk at the Origem of Everywhere on September 16, 2025.
What if a single mushroom could not only change your mind, but also slow down how your body ages?
Psychedelics have long been studied for mental health, but only recently are scientists asking if they could also alter the biology of aging.
Today I want to explore the frontier where psychedelics meet longevity science.
Why Psychedelics Matter for Aging
First I want to give you a brief intro into longevity science.
Scientists often talk about the 12 hallmarks of aging.
Actually in my PhD, we only have nine hallmarks of aging, but over the last 10 years weāve added three more.
These hallmarks are processes to explain how the body slowly breaks down over time.
I wonāt talk about each of the 12 in detail, rather I will cover them as divided into three categories.
The first group is about cellular housekeeping failures.
Imagine your DNA getting little cracks, your chromosomes losing their protective caps, kind of like shoelaces fraying when the plastic tips wear off.
Or your cells forgetting how to take out the garbage, letting waste pile up.
Eventually, the system just breaks.
The second group is about communication breakdowns.
Your cells normally talk to each other all day long, like neighbors sharing news.
With age, those messages get garbled.
Inflammation ramps up, nutrient sensing goes haywire, and itās like your bodyās group chat has been hacked.
And then we have the runaway processes.
Some cells turn into what scientists call āsenescent cells,ā I like to call them the party guests who refuse to leave.
Theyāre not doing much, but they hang around anyway, getting in the way of you ending the party and cleaning up.
On top of that your mitochondria, the powerhouse of your cells, donāt hold a charge like they used to.
Put all of that together and you get the gradual decline we call aging.
Now, let me connect the dots.
Mental health and aging are deeply intertwined.
We know that depression, chronic stress, and anxiety donāt just affect your mind, they speed up several of the biological hallmarks of aging.
They shorten telomeres (the protective caps on your DNA).
They drive inflammation.
They increase oxidative stress.
In other words, your emotional state leaves fingerprints on your biology.
Psychedelics already have some of the strongest clinical evidence weāve ever seen for treating mood disorders like depression and anxiety.
What excites researchers about psychedelics is that they don't just improve mood, it looks like they may touch multiple hallmarks at once.
So the natural next question is this: if psychedelics can improve mental health, could they also slow down, or even reverse, some of the biological aging processes that stress and depression accelerate?
Thatās exactly what researchers are starting to investigate.
Psychedelics, Trauma, and Longevity
Before I take you into cellular aging studies, I want to pause and talk about something more human: trauma.
Trauma isnāt just psychological.
It leaves a biological imprint.
People with a history of trauma show higher inflammation, shorter telomeres, and a higher risk of diseases of aging, heart disease, diabetes, dementia.
Some researchers say trauma can āageā the body by years or even decades.
Psychedelics have been making headlines for their ability to help people process trauma, whether through MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, or psilocybin for depression and end-of-life anxiety.
Whatās happening is more than just a shift in mood.
Itās a chance to rewrite the bodyās stress response.
Think of trauma as a constant alarm bell ringing inside the nervous system.
The cortisol, the adrenaline, the hypervigilance, all of that wears down the body over time.
When psychedelics help people face and release those stored patterns, itās like finally turning off the alarm. The nervous system resets.
And when the nervous system resets, the whole body benefits.
Sleep improves, inflammation drops, immune function stabilizes.
Those are not small things, theyāre some of the strongest predictors of long-term health and longevity.
So when we ask: can psychedelics slow or reverse aging?, part of the answer might be by helping us release trauma, they free our biology to heal.
Psychedelics and Neuroplasticity
Another reason psychedelics are so interesting for aging has to do with neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the brainās ability to rewire itself.
Your brain has the ability to grow new connections, strengthen pathways, and even repair after damage.
As we age, that plasticity declines.
Learning gets harder, recovery after injury is slower, and in diseases like Alzheimerās or Parkinsonās, neurons literally lose their ability to adapt.
Psychedelics seem to flip that switch back on.
In lab studies, psilocybin and other psychedelics increase the density and size of dendritic spines, those little branches on neurons that form connections. Some of those changes stick around for weeks, even after just a single dose.
Human studies back this up.
Paul Stamets and the Quantified Citizen team even showed improved finger tapping performance, a measure of motor-cognitive function, in adults over 55 who took psilocybin.
Why does this matter for longevity?
Because neuroplasticity is a gateway.
If we can keep the brain flexible, adaptive, and connected, we can keep the brain resilient against aging itselfā¦preserving memory, cognition, and motor function well into later life.
Case Study #1: Parkinsonās Disease
Parkinsonās Disease affects 10M people globally, with no proven therapies that slow disease progression.
It is characterized as a movement disorder, due to the motor side effects we see in patients - the tremors, shuffling gaits and stiff movements.
But what many people donāt realize is that the depression and anxiety that come with Parkinsonās are actually stronger predictors of quality of life than the tremors themselves.
And these mood symptoms often appear years before the first tremor ever shows up.
While medications like levodopa can help with the shaking and movement issues, we currently have nothing that slows down or reverses the disease.
Some patients are prescribed antidepressants to ease their depression and anxiety, but most of the time they donāt work in Parkinsonās patients at all.
So a research team at UCSF asked - āCould psilocybin help Parkinson's patients who experience debilitating mood dysfunction alongside their motor symptoms?ā
Their results were published on April 9, 2025 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
That was just over 4 months agoā¦Just to give you an idea of how cutting edge and recent the work with aging and psychedelics are.
They ran a pilot study with 12 patients with mild to moderate Parkinsonās Disease.
The patients received psychotherapy before and after, and either a lower dose or higher dose of psilocybin (10mg ā 25mg).
The results showed significant improvements in mood and cognition.
Most surprisingly, is that their motor symptoms improved too.
And the effects lasted 3+ months later.
Why did this happen?
We have some possible theories.
First off, when you feel better, you move more, socialize more, and your body works better.
But researchers also think psilocybin reduces inflammation, promotes neuroplasticity, and might even help the brain repair itself.
What the researchers at UCSF found is that psilocybin isnāt just treating symptoms of Parkinsonās disease, the results hint at disease modification, potentially slowing or reversing neurodegeneration.
The promising results have led to an expanded randomized controlled trial at UCSF, with a second site at Yale University.
This larger study aims to enroll 100 participants and will incorporate:
Noninvasive brain stimulation
Neuroimaging
Advanced tools to understand how psilocybin impacts inflammation and neuroplasticity
Case Study #2: Psilocybin and Aging
And if psilocybin can shift the trajectory of Parkinsonās, and help resolve trauma, and enhance neuroplasticity, what about aging itself?
First, they treated human lung cells in the lab with psilocin, the active metabolite of psilocybin.
They found a 30% extension in cellular lifespan with low dose (10 Ī¼M) psilocin.
At the higher doses of psilocin, the lung cells lived 57% longer.
Their telomeres stayed intact, their DNA damage was lower, it reduced oxidative stress and increased SIRT1 expression (SIRT1 is a master regulator of aging).
Psilocin also delayed hitting the āsenescenceā state, where the healthy cells turn into zombie cells.
Cell studies are exciting, but the real exciting data came from the mouse studies.
The researchers treated 19-month-old female mice (equivalent to 60-65 human years) with monthly psilocybin doses for 10 months.
They found an 80% survival in psilocybin-treated mice vs. 50% in controls.
The mice even appeared to look younger with improved fur quality and reduced graying.
Yes, mouse fur turns grey as they age. (Awww)
Overall survival improved by 30 percent in the experimental group which received psilocybin.
Soā¦what's happening at the molecular level?
Mechanistically, it came down to the same hallmarks we just talked about: telomere preservation, antioxidant defenses through Nrf2, DNA repair, and upregulation of SIRT1, one of the master longevity proteins.
This research validates the "psilocybin-telomere hypothesis" first proposed in 2020 by Christopher Germann.
The theory suggested that psilocybin's clinical benefits across depression, anxiety, and neurodegenerative diseases might stem from its impact on biological aging markers.
The connection makes intuitive sense: chronic stress, depression, and anxiety are all associated with accelerated telomere shortening and premature aging.
This validates what some researchers had suspected for years: that psilocybinās benefits for mental health might be inseparable from its impact on biological aging.
It doesnāt just shift mood, it shifts the molecular clock.
Which is why some scientists are now calling psilocybin the first āgeroprotective psychedelic,ā simultaneously addressing mental health, neurodegeneration, and cellular aging.
The FDA has already designated psilocybin as a "breakthrough therapy" for depression, and these findings suggest its therapeutic potential extends far beyond mental health.
Psychedelics as Aging-Medicines
Weāre used to thinking of psychedelics as only mind medicines.
But the evidence suggests they may be whole-body medicines, altering fundamental processes of aging.
I personally love seeing the science show evidence that bridges ancient plant medicine wisdom with cutting-edge longevity science.
To return to the opening question: āCan psychedelics slow or reverse aging?ā
The early evidence saysā¦ maybe!
Weāre only at the beginning, but the possibility that a single compound can improve mental health, repair the brain, and slow aging is too important to ignore.
The future of longevity might just be more psychedelic than we ever imagined.
Want to dive deeper?
Read the full study: "Psilocybin treatment extends cellular lifespan and improves survival of aged mice" in npj Aging
Explore my previous notes on psychedelics:
Check out my longevity framework: #126: ā©ļø My Six Pillars of Longevity
š Book of the Week
Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
Rating: ā ā ā ā ā
This book had me hooked from the very first page.
It is the story of two women who flee a crime scene after an SAT tutor arrives at her studentās house to find the parents brutally murdered.
The unsettling murder mystery soon morphs into a darkly funny road trip, layered with unexpected romance and ending with serious Parasite vibes too.
The twist, I did not see coming.
100% recommend, especially as we approach spooky season.
ā”ļø Check This Out
Mushrooms are more closely related to animals than plants.
The first hypotheses about the relationship between fungi and animals emerged in the 1950s, he said. Scientists were able to test and confirm these suspicions years later.
There are major overlapping characteristics shared by fungi and animals that plants do not have, said John Walker, a professor at Appalachian State University who studies fungi.
For example, both mushrooms and humans store carbohydrate energy as glycogen, while plants use starch to store energy.
Both fungi and insects use the polysaccharide chitin to build cell walls, while plants use cellulose. And mushrooms, like humans, produce vitamin D when exposed to sunlight.
Paul Stamets, a mycologist and author, told WBUR that humans share nearly 50% of their DNA with fungi.
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