From Ego to Eco: How Psychedelics Change Our Sense of Connection
One of the most consistent findings in psychedelic research is also one of the strangest, and the one I think gets the least attention in popular conversation.
People who have profound psychedelic experiences often emerge with a lasting, measurable change in how connected they feel to the natural world.
Not as a metaphor. Not as a fleeting mystical impression that fades within days. As a stable shift, measurable on psychological scales, persisting in some cases for two years or longer after the experience.
A growing body of research — much of it led by Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues — has been documenting this phenomenon. The original landmark study by Hannes Kettner and his team, From Egoism to Ecoism, found that people who took psychedelic substances showed significant increases in nature relatedness — a well-validated psychological measure of how connected someone feels to the natural world — at two weeks post-experience. Follow-up research has now extended these findings, with some studies showing the changes persist for up to two years.
What predicts this shift? Two things, primarily. The depth of ego dissolution during the experience — the temporary loosening of the felt sense of being a separate self. And the environmental setting of the experience itself — sessions that happen in nature produce stronger and more lasting increases in nature connectedness than those that happen indoors.
This finding is more important than it first appears. It connects to questions about psychological healing, ecological crisis, and what it actually means to be a self. I want to walk through it carefully, because I think it's one of the more meaningful discoveries to come out of the psychedelic research renaissance.
What Nature Relatedness Actually Is
The concept of nature relatedness sounds like it might be soft — a self-report of whether you like trees. The actual psychological construct is more specific and more clinically meaningful.
Nature relatedness measures how much a person experiences themselves as part of the natural world rather than separate from it. It includes felt sense, identity, and lived experience. Someone with low nature relatedness might appreciate nature aesthetically but experience themselves as distinct from it — nature is over there, I am over here. Someone with high nature relatedness experiences themselves as embedded in, continuous with, and intrinsically connected to the natural world. The trees aren't just outside; they're somehow part of the same fabric the person is part of.
This isn't a personality quirk. Research has consistently shown that nature relatedness is associated with:
Lower rates of anxiety and depression. Higher self-reported well-being. Greater meaning in life. Higher levels of positive emotion. Reduced stress and improved cognitive function. Greater pro-environmental behavior. And — this is the part most directly relevant to clinical work — significantly better outcomes on a range of mental health measures.
In other words, the felt sense of being connected to nature isn't just nice. It appears to be one of the underrecognized pathways to psychological health.
This makes the finding that psychedelics can reliably increase nature relatedness — and that this increase mediates the therapeutic outcomes themselves — clinically significant. It suggests that part of what's healing about psychedelic experience isn't only the loosening of rigid patterns or the processing of difficult material. It's the restoration of a connection most people in modern life have lost.
What Ego Dissolution Has to Do With It
The mechanism the research keeps pointing to is ego dissolution.
Ego dissolution is the experience, during certain psychedelic states, of the felt sense of being a separate self becoming less solid. The boundaries between you and the world soften. The narrative of who you are quiets. The constant background processing that ordinarily produces the experience of being yourself, here, distinct from everything else temporarily releases its grip.
This experience can be unsettling, especially for people who haven't been prepared for it. But for many people, especially when held in supportive conditions, it's described as one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives. The walls that have always seemed to separate them from the world thin. What's left isn't nothing — it's a kind of expanded, more spacious sense of belonging.
What the research is showing is that this experience of dissolved selfhood doesn't just produce a passing impression. It produces a lasting recalibration of how connected the person feels to everything outside themselves. The wall, once it's been seen as a wall rather than as reality, doesn't quite go back up the same way.
For many people, this shows up most palpably as nature connectedness. They emerge from the experience and find that they notice trees differently. They feel an unfamiliar tenderness for animals. They recognize themselves as part of the living world in a way that had previously been intellectual rather than felt. The shift is often subtle but persistent.
It also shows up — and the research is increasingly clear about this — as social connectedness. People who experience ego dissolution often report lasting increases in their felt sense of connection to other people. They describe more empathy, more openness, more willingness to be moved by other people's experiences. The boundary that dissolved wasn't just between self and nature. It was between self and other, more broadly.
A 2025 review paper proposes that what psychedelics may produce is a generalized self-other overlap — a softening of the boundary that ordinarily separates the self from everything else, with implications for connection to nature, to other people, and to life as a whole.
Why This Matters in This Moment
I want to spend some time here because the finding intersects with something I see often in my practice, and that I think more therapists need to be naming.
Many of my clients are quietly suffering from forms of distress that don't have neat clinical names. A vague but persistent sense of disconnection — from themselves, from others, from the world. A grief they can't quite articulate about the state of nature, the loss of biodiversity, the climate news that arrives daily. A loneliness that goes deeper than relationships, into something more existential.
The term eco-anxiety has begun to enter clinical conversation, though it's still underdeveloped. What I see in clients includes that and goes beyond it. It's a particular kind of suffering that comes from living inside the contemporary version of human selfhood — separated from the rest of the living world, individuated to the point of isolation, identified with a self that's measured by achievement and consumption rather than belonging.
This isn't the same as depression in any standard diagnostic sense. It's something closer to what the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy has called the great unraveling — the inner correlate of an ecological crisis that's actually happening around us. People feel it. Most don't have language for it. And the cultural script tells them to keep going, keep working, keep consuming, keep producing — even as something inside them knows that the disconnection is itself a kind of wound.
What the psychedelic research is suggesting is that this disconnection isn't permanent. The felt sense of being separate from the natural world is not a fixed feature of being human. It's a construction — culturally, neurologically, developmentally — that can change.
Indigenous traditions have known this forever. Many contemplative traditions have known it. Now, the research is showing it neurologically. And for people who are quietly suffering from the modern condition of disconnection, this is a meaningful piece of information.
Why Setting Matters So Much
The Kettner study and several that have followed found something specific about where the experience takes place.
People who had psychedelic experiences in natural settings showed larger and more lasting increases in nature relatedness than those who had experiences indoors. The medicine and the environment combined — neither alone produced the same effect.
This makes sense in light of how psychedelics work. The medicine softens the predictive scaffolding that ordinarily structures experience. What replaces that scaffolding, temporarily, is whatever the person is actually encountering. If the encounter is with trees, sky, water, the texture of soil, the rhythm of wind, the surrounding life of a forest or shoreline — the new experience that consolidates in the brain has those elements woven through it.
If the encounter is with a clinical room, fluorescent lights, and a screen, the experience integrates around those.
This isn't a value judgment about clinical settings — they have important uses, particularly for people whose suffering requires the safety and structure of a controlled environment. But it's a reminder that set and setting aren't soft variables in psychedelic work. They shape what gets built during the experience and what consolidates afterward.
For traditions that have used these medicines ceremonially for thousands of years, this isn't news. Many Indigenous psychedelic traditions take place in or near specific natural settings, often connected to sacred land, with the natural world understood as part of the medicine itself. The research is now describing, in neurological language, something traditional practitioners have long known.
What This Tells Us About Healing
This research changes how I think about psychedelic-assisted therapy, and about therapeutic work more broadly.
For a long time, clinical psychology has framed mental health primarily as an internal matter. Fix the thoughts. Process the trauma. Regulate the nervous system. Build healthier internal structures.
These are real and important. But the research on nature relatedness suggests something additional: that part of what's actually wrong in many forms of psychological suffering is relational in a deeper sense than therapy ordinarily considers. Not just our relationships with other people, though those matter. Our relationship with the living world we're embedded in.
When that relationship is severed — and modern life severs it in countless small ways — people don't always know how to name what's missing. They feel disconnected, anxious, depressed, restless, but the conventional categories don't quite capture what's actually happening. They've lost something fundamental about being a living creature among other living creatures, and the loss is so culturally normalized that it goes unnamed.
What psychedelic experiences can offer, in this view, isn't only an opening into difficult inner material. They can also offer a temporary restoration of a connection that's been culturally suppressed. The experience of being part of the living world rather than separate from it. The recognition that the boundary between self and nature, while useful for some purposes, isn't fundamental.
When this connection is felt directly, something can change that no amount of cognitive understanding alone produces. People come back from these experiences and their lives often look different — not because they've solved anything in particular, but because they've remembered something about being alive that they had forgotten.
How This Can Show Up Without a Medicine
I want to be careful not to suggest that psychedelics are the only path to this kind of shift. They aren't. The research keeps pointing back to the underlying mechanism — self-expansion, self-other overlap, the softening of the boundary between self and world — which can happen through many pathways.
Time in nature, especially time spent slowly and attentively, increases nature relatedness even without any medicine. Studies have shown this consistently. A daily walk in a natural setting, with attention turned outward, gradually shifts the felt sense of self over weeks and months. Not dramatically, but real.
Contemplative practice produces similar shifts. Sustained meditation, particularly the practices oriented toward non-dual awareness, also softens the boundary between self and world. People who've practiced for years sometimes describe a similar quality of belonging that psychedelic experiences can produce more rapidly.
Deep relational experiences can do this — extended time with another being whose presence quiets the usual narrative of separation. People often describe this in the company of certain animals, with elders or wise teachers, in caregiving relationships, in long-term romantic partnerships that have moved beyond the early relational dynamics into something more spacious.
Even ordinary moments can produce small versions of this shift. Sunset light. The texture of moss. A child sleeping. The sound of wind in trees. Many of us have felt, in such moments, a brief loosening of the sense of being a separate self — a quiet recognition that we belong to something larger.
The psychedelic experience can produce these states more reliably and more powerfully. But the shift it produces isn't qualitatively different from what's available, in subtler forms, in ordinary life. The medicines may amplify and accelerate a recognition that's always available to anyone willing to attend carefully.
A Closing Reflection
What I find most meaningful about this research isn't the clinical implications, though those matter. It's the philosophical implication.
The deep assumption of modern Western life — that we are separate selves, individuated and self-contained, distinct from the natural world and from each other — turns out to be one possible configuration of consciousness, not the only one. There are other ways to experience being alive. The walls can soften. The connection can be felt directly.
For people in psychological distress, particularly the modern forms of distress that involve disconnection, isolation, and the felt absence of meaning, this is hopeful information. Whatever sense of separation has been organizing your suffering is not the final truth about who you are. It is one model your brain has been running. The model can soften.
For the larger questions of our moment — ecological grief, climate distress, the felt unraveling of the natural world we're all part of — this research offers something else. The disconnection many of us have been living inside is not just our individual problem. It's a cultural condition, and it has individual consequences. But the connection that's been lost is not gone. It's recoverable.
This is, I think, part of why psychedelic therapy has felt so important to so many people in this moment. Not because the medicines are magic. Not because they fix anything in particular. But because they can help people remember something that the world we've built has obscured: that we belong to the living world, that we are not alone in it, that the wall between self and nature is more provisional than it seems.
If you'd like to explore this kind of work — through depth therapy, integration support, contemplative practice, or some combination — you're welcome to book a consultation. And whether or not psychedelic experience is part of your path, the recognition this research points toward is available, in quieter forms, to anyone willing to look for it.