The control freak's guide to letting go

I have skirted around psychedelics for years. I've been curious. I've found the retreat in Portugal. I've got as far as thinking that perhaps this time I'll say yes. And then I haven't.

When I admitted this to Nasreen El-Mariesh, a transformational coach and psychedelic integration coach, I also admitted what was underneath it. Fear. What would I see? How would I cope with not being in control? I can talk quite comfortably about wanting to change, right up until the change involves something I can't manage in advance.

This isn't an argument for taking psychedelics. Curiosity is not a recommendation, and a podcast conversation is not medical advice. What interested me in talking to Nasreen was how quickly a subject that sounds unfamiliar became a conversation about something I know very well: the effort of keeping everything under control.

The version of ourselves we know how to be

Nasreen works with midlife women, and she recognises the tension. Someone can be genuinely ready for something different and still fight the experience of not knowing what happens next. Wanting to let go doesn't mean we find it easy.

Her observation is that midlife often unsettles the identities we've spent years building. A career changes. Children need us differently. A role that once organised the whole day no longer does. There can be a lot of experience and confidence alongside a surprisingly basic question: who am I now?

It is tempting to answer that by finding another thing to be good at. Another role, another qualification, another plan. Something with enough structure that we can feel competent again. But that doesn't necessarily tell us what we actually want, or why the old version stopped fitting.

Curiosity comes with baggage

Psychedelics bring their own set of associations into that conversation. Drugs. Hallucinations. Bad trips. A particular kind of wellness retreat you may or may not want anything to do with. Nasreen described having been frightened of them herself before she began exploring the subject.

She distinguishes microdosing from a larger psychedelic experience, and talks about people encountering their thoughts or familiar patterns differently. Her own account includes a profound personal experience; she also describes experiences others have shared with her. Those stories can explain someone's curiosity without establishing that a substance will help somebody else.

Nasreen makes clear that she isn't a clinician. That matters. A coach's experience and a participant's account are not the same as clinical evidence. These substances can carry serious risks, and many are illegal in the UK. Medical suitability and interactions with medication require qualified medical advice, not reassurance from a compelling story or a facilitator who looks the part.

There is room to hear why people are interested without turning interest into an instruction. There is also room to decide the subject isn't for you. A wish to know yourself better doesn't create an obligation to take a drug.

I can organise everything except uncertainty

The most revealing part of our conversation was not about a substance at all. It was the moment I described myself as a control freak. Nasreen challenged the attachment to that identity: how much of being in control is real, and how much is the story we tell ourselves about how we stay safe?

I can make a plan, prepare for a conversation, research something until I have exhausted every possible question. What I can't do is remove all uncertainty from being alive. Yet I can spend an enormous amount of energy behaving as though one more bit of preparation might finally do it.

That doesn't make planning pointless. There are good reasons to want safety, especially when something genuinely carries risk. But I recognise the point where preparation stops helping me decide and starts helping me avoid deciding. I can remain very busy around the edges of a change without ever making one.

What happens afterwards matters

Nasreen kept returning to integration: what someone does with an experience after it has happened. How an insight becomes part of ordinary life rather than a powerful story you tell while everything else stays exactly the same.

That seems relevant far beyond psychedelics. We can have a revealing conversation, read something that makes us uncomfortable or realise we've been repeating a pattern for years. The realisation can feel enormous. Then Monday arrives and we respond in exactly the way we always have.

There isn't a dramatic conclusion to my own curiosity here. I haven't come away with a conversion story or a retreat booking to announce. What I have is a clearer view of the friction: wanting something to change while hoping I can stay in complete command of how it changes me.

I suspect that is the part of this conversation many of us already understand, whether psychedelics interest us or not. It is easier to say we want a different life than to admit we might not know how to be the person living it. That is a question worth sitting with before rushing to find an answer.