Scientists Studied Ayahuasca Users—What They Found About Death
jelizondo writes:
PsyPost has a very interesting report about the consequences of using Ayahuasca on our feelings about death.
I've been interested in the stuff but a couple of friends that tried it reported there is a large possibility of vomiting after drinking the stuff and I just don't like that. Point of fact, they ask you to fast before the ceremony to minimize vomiting but to me dry heaves are worst.
Anyway, a very interesting read.
People who regularly use ayahuasca, a traditional Amazonian psychedelic drink, may have a fundamentally different way of relating to death. A new study published in the journal Psychopharmacology indicates that long-term ayahuasca users tend to show less fear, anxiety, and avoidance around death-and instead exhibit more acceptance. These effects appear to be driven not by spiritual beliefs or personality traits, but by a psychological attitude known as "impermanence acceptance."
The findings come from researchers at the University of Haifa, who sought to better understand how psychedelics influence people's thinking and behavior around mortality. According to their data, it is not belief in an afterlife or a shift in metaphysical views that predicts reduced death anxiety. Instead, the results suggest that learning to accept change and the transient nature of life may be central to how ayahuasca helps people relate more calmly to death.
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew traditionally used by Indigenous Amazonian groups in healing and spiritual rituals. The drink contains the powerful hallucinogen DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) along with harmala alkaloids that make it orally active. Many users describe deeply emotional, and often death-themed, visions during their experiences. These may include the sensation of personal death, symbolic rebirth, contact with deceased individuals, or feelings of ego dissolution-the temporary loss of a sense of self.
The research team, led by Jonathan David and Yair Dor-Ziderman, were interested in this recurring death-related content. Historical records, cultural traditions, and previous studies all suggest that ayahuasca frequently evokes visions or thoughts related to death. In one survey, over half of ayahuasca users said they had experienced what felt like a "personal death" during a session. Others described visions involving graves, spirits, or life-after-death themes.
Despite these consistent reports, empirical studies that systematically assess how ayahuasca affects death-related cognition and emotion remain rare. Past work has often relied on limited self-reports, lacked control groups, and overlooked possible mediating psychological factors. The current study aimed to address those gaps with a more rigorous design.
"We were motivated by the lack of research exploring how ayahuasca use might relate to the way people think about and come to terms with the most certain aspect of life: death. Most studies in this area have focused on other psychedelics and on short-term or clinical effects, while we wanted to explore longer-lasting, personality-level changes. We also wanted to understand why such changes might occur, which has been largely missing from the existing literature," David told PsyPost.
"There is a hype in popular and scientific venues regarding the efficacy of psychedelics to affect a fundamental shift in our response to the theme of death. In particular, ayahuasca has long been described as the 'vine of the dead' (translation from Quechua) and death-related themes are pervasive in ayahuasca visions," added Dor-Ziderman, a research director at the University of Haifa and visiting scholar at Padova University.
"However, there has been surprisingly little empirical work on how such encounters shape one's relationship with mortality. Furthermore, most existing studies rely on single self-report scales and overlook the unconscious, behavioral, and cognitive layers of how humans process death. We wanted to provide a comprehensive, multidimensional assessment of "death processing," and to identify the causal mechanisms which mediate, or account for, long-term differences in death processing between ayahuasca users and non-users."
To examine how these individuals relate to death, the researchers administered a detailed set of questionnaires and behavioral tasks. These included measures of death anxiety, fear of personal death, death-avoidant behaviors, and death acceptance. They also used implicit tasks, such as response times to death-related words, to capture unconscious reactions. The idea was to get a broad, multi-dimensional picture of how people think and feel about mortality.
The researchers found statistically significant differences between the two groups. Compared to non-users, ayahuasca users scored lower on death anxiety, were less likely to avoid thinking about death, showed fewer fear responses, and expressed greater acceptance of mortality. These patterns held true across both self-report and behavioral measures. Notably, even the subtle response time tasks pointed in the same direction.
The effect sizes were moderate to large, suggesting these differences are not just statistical artifacts. The changes showed up in emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains alike, which the authors interpret as evidence of a generalized shift in how ayahuasca users process the idea of death.
"Although these findings should be interpreted with caution, since this was a cross-sectional and mostly self-report study, our results suggest that ayahuasca use may help people feel less anxious about death and more accepting of it, especially among long-term users," David said.
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