The "suicide headache." With a name this morbid, cluster headaches live up to their name as one of the worst pains known to modern medicine. A pain so extreme, so consuming, that for some, death is a sweet relief to their pain-ridden existence.
To paint a picture, those with it often describe it as being shot in the eye multiple times a day.
There is no cure for cluster headaches and no treatment with reliable efficacy rates, although many do come with a slew of side effects.
Luckily, psychedelics once again offer us a beacon of hope where conventional pharmaceutical medicine failed.
More specifically, taking microdoses of psychedelic compounds known as hallucinogenic tryptamines, like Psilocybin and LSD, appears to be the one treatment that brings effective, predictable, and long-term relief.
In this article, you'll learn how to treat your cluster headache with Psilocybin mushrooms in 3 scenarios:
- to break a cycle
- to prevent a cycle
- to stop an attack
You'll also learn about proper dosing, preparation, ingestion, and what you can expect from the experience.
If you're not sure whether you want to treat your cluster headaches with Psilocybin yet, and stumbled on this article while looking for a guide that can give you a comprehensive background on the science, protocols, and medical interactions, check out our guide, "Psilocybin & Cluster Headaches: What You Need to Know First."
If you're here because you want to learn how you can start treating your cluster headaches with Psilocybin mushrooms immediately, you're in the right place.
Let's go.
Safety precautions before you begin.
Avoid Potential Medical Interactions
Some medications can interfere with your cluster headache's Psilocybin treatment. It is important to stop taking them and to let them clear out of your system before using tryptamines. This includes many cluster medicines and this can be difficult, but there are ways to survive clusters without Imitrex or verapamil.
Medications for other conditions and recreational drugs can also interfere with your Psilocybin treatment, and it is important to avoid triggers such as alcohol.
Of course, you should never stop or change your medication without your doctor’s knowledge and consent.
It is important to stay away from cluster medications both before and after your Psilocybin dose. You may continue to experience attacks in the first little bit after your Psilocybin treatment; if that's the case, please understand that this is completely normal, and has happened to many people before you. The key here is to resist resorting to Imitrex or other interfering meds, which can cause the treatment to fail.
Avoid Building A Tolerance
Your body's beautiful adaptive response responds rapidly to Psilocybin, adapting to it by building a tolerance after just one dose. As such, taking a second dose too soon after the first can make the treatment ineffective.
Remember Rule of Five
The Rule of Five is a conservative rule of thumb that suggests waiting for five days. For example:
- Wait five days after stopping Imitrex or verapamil before taking Psilocybin
- Wait five days after your Psilocybin dose before returning to conventional meds such as Imitrex
- Wait five days between doses of Psilocybin.
Psilocybin for breaking a cluster headache cycle.
People often resort to treating their cluster headaches with Psilocybin when they are in the middle of a cycle and desperate to end the attacks.
To break a cluster headache cycle with Psilocybin, it usually takes repeated doses that are just strong enough to stop the beast, but not so strong you're having a full psychedelic trip. However, note that it does take a stronger microdose (250 – 300 milligrams of dried Psilocybin mushrooms), or even a minidose, to break a cluster headache cycle once it starts.
Read: How to Dose Magic Mushrooms, Plus Tips You Need To Know
The amount of Psilocybin taken is important; too little and the treatment won’t work, but too much and the experience can become unpleasant. On the other hand, many people also report enjoying or feeling inspired by a significant psychedelic experience and obtain benefits beyond cluster relief.
We don’t oppose enjoying one’s medicine (we know we do), but the focus here is on treating clusters with as few side effects as possible.
Dosing to prevent a cycle.
If you're here to prevent a cluster headache cycle, you're in luck—Psilocybin and other hallucinogenic tryptamines are the only medications that seem to be able to prevent cluster cycles (that we've discovered).
It is easier to prevent the start of a cluster headache cycle than it is to break the cycle once it starts. Preventive dosing is very effective and can keep you pain-free for miraculous periods at a time.
Luckily, most clusterheads have very predictable cycles. Every year they start right at the spring equinox, for example, or at the end of June.
If you are aware of your cycle, we advise taking your Psilocybin dose once or twice a few weeks before your cycle is expected. Hopefully, it'll never turn up.
Many clusterheads report being able to keep their cluster headaches at bay for years with a regular schedule of microdosing every few months or once or twice a year.
If your cycles aren’t predictable, the earlier you can respond to the signs the better. We recommend having your Psilocybin treatment on hand by preparing or ordering it ahead of time. That way, you can take action at the very first hint of a new cluster headache cycle.
Dosing to stop attacks.
Some people find great success aborting individual cluster headache attacks by taking small doses of Psilocybin as they happen.
Historically, this was discovered after psychonauts with cluster headaches started noticing that taking moderate doses of Psilocybin mushrooms would stop an attack in its tracks. The trouble is, they realized that too-high dosages, which were extremely effective at stopping the attacks, would quickly trigger your body's adaptive response and block the effectiveness of subsequent doses for four or five days.
After further experimentation, we discovered that taking amounts just slightly higher than your typical microdose would not build your tolerance too quickly, and could be repeated as attacks occurred. At such small amounts, there would also be little or no psychedelic effects at all.
The first cluster headache microdosing experiments involved placing small pieces of dried Psilocybin mushrooms under the tongue and holding them there. This method was dubbed the SPUT method, short for “Small Piece Under Tongue,” and was based on the idea that the tissues inside of your mouth absorb the Psilocybin better and deliver them directly into your bloodstream, without passing through the stomach.
The SPUT method works more rapidly than swallowing the mushrooms, and can also be used with pre-made Psilocybin mushroom capsules.
Soon after the SPUT method was discovered, people were reporting they could stop an attack within 10 to 20 minutes. The taste was bad, but it might as well be ambrosia compared to cluster headache attack.
Like just about everything else concerning clusters, this technique does not work for everyone, and likely will not work for breaking a cycle.
Some have tried using the SPUT technique to break a cycle, with the hopes that taking a SPUT daily whether there was an attack or not would break the cycle without resorting to larger, slightly more hallucinogenic doses. Unfortunately, the reported results so far have ranged from disappointing to inconclusive.
Psilocybin dosage for cluster headaches.
Clusterheads often say they use about half the amount commonly taken for a mild recreational mushroom trip. How much this will be depends on the mushroom species, its moisture content, and storage conditions. For example, fresh mushrooms are mostly water and will weigh about ten times as much as their dried mushroom equivalence.
One gram of "bone-dry" Golden Teacher, a strain from the Psilocybe cubensis species, is a typical recreational dose, so half a gram or less is a common medicinal dose starting point.
Everyone is different, so Psilocybin will affect everyone differently. It's always wise to start low and glow slow, perhaps with a quarter of a gram (250 milligrams), and adjust it upward as necessary.
If you are consuming raw Psilocybin mushrooms, be careful.
The potency of each batch of mushrooms can vary. Even different parts of the same mushroom can vary, and mushrooms picked early can be quite potent relative to their small size and weight. They have as much psilocybin when they first appear as when they do when they grow to full size.
If you're looking for a high-quality source of consistently dosed Psilocybin mushrooms in a convenient form, we offer microdose formulas that start at 25 milligrams of Psilocybin mushrooms per capsule and macrodose formulas starting at 250 milligrams of Psilocybin Mushrooms per capsule.
How to prepare your Psilocybin mushroom treatment.
Psilocybin mushrooms can be eaten whole, in small pieces, in capsules, soaked in honey, as delicious gummies or decadent brownies, covered in chocolate, lemon teked, or made into a mushroom tea. Most of these methods are more or less the same, with the exception of lemon teking.
We do not attempt lemon teking if you are a novice. While effective at reducing nausea, it increases the intensity of the trip by up to 5x. As such, we only recommend it to seasoned psychonauts.
But most people find the taste of psilocybin mushrooms very disagreeable and prefer to ingest them in a manner that disguises or minimizes the taste. If this sounds like you, but you're still a beginner, stick to capsules, edibles, and tea.
Reducing Nausea With Mushroom Tea
Making mushroom tea is a very controllable and tolerable way of ingesting psilocybin.
First, store your Psilocybin mushrooms whole until just before making the tea. Next, finely chop the shrooms and soak them in hot – not boiling – water for 10 minutes or so.
Next, you'll want to extract as much active ingredient from the resulting mushroom goop as possible. Strain out the mushroom bits, set the mushroom water aside, then steep the strained mushroom bits in fresh water. All the steeped water should be saved and mixed together.
This basic tea can be made ahead of time and stored in a refrigerator for a week or two, much longer if frozen. A blue or greenish-blue color is normal, but discard if it gets cloudy or looks funny. Some like to mix in other ingredients to further mask the taste and speed absorption into the body, which you can learn more about at the link below.
Read: How to Make Shroom Tea: The Ultimate Guide
Since various mushroom parts and individual mushrooms can vary in potency, making tea out of all the bits evens these variations out to ensure consistent dosing. Another benefit is that dividing the tea into equal or specific amounts is much easier and can be done more accurately than with dried mushrooms.
Best way to ingest your Psilocybin mushroom treatment.
The main challenge is keeping the mushrooms down. Shrooms are famous for the mild nausea they can produce, but this effect can be avoided by making mushroom tea or taking it in capsule form.
For best absorption, take the mushrooms or tea on an empty or nearly-empty stomach. Eating fatty or greasy foods can coat the stomach and prevent the rapid metabolism of Psilocybin.
What to expect when taking Psilocybin for cluster headaches.
Generally, you can expect to feel the psychedelic effects 20 minutes to two hours after ingestion.
Once the mushrooms are ingested, patience is important. A common mistake is thinking the dose was too small, taking more, and discovering that the effects were merely delayed. At that point, the dose and its effects are more than wanted or expected.
Take the dose at a time and place that will provide you with the best set and setting for a potential psychedelic experience. Depending on the dose and your unique chemistry, the psychedelic effects may continue for two to six hours.
While the idea here is to avoid a psychedelic journey, always expect to experience some level of psychedelia to creep in. Usually this is mild, since an effective dose should give you the same "buzz" you might get from two beers, though it is a different type of buzz altogether.
Of course, significant trips can also occur, and this experience can be awe-inspiring, unsettling or both.
Beware the "Slap-backs"
We hope that Psilocybin helps you find quick and easy relief from your cluster headaches. But there is a chance things get worse, or at least weirder, before they get better.
Clusterheads often report that treating their cluster headaches with Psilocybin and other psychedelics leads to a short-term opposite effect before working. For example, they report experiencing severe, increased, or unusual cluster attacks in the days immediately following their Psilocybin dose.
These “slap-back” attacks can be distressing, but they are temporary and can be a sign the tryptamines are taking effect. Better days are likely to follow.
