By popular demand, this week we’ll discuss microdosing. You’ve likely recently heard of microdosing in popular culture. Maybe you’ve heard how Silicon Valley likes to microdose to enhance creativity and productivity, or how it’s been used to improve mental health.
I received a question about the difference between microdosing and the use of smaller doses of psychedelics in therapy, so I want to briefly address that. From the 1950s to 1970s, when psychiatrists started working with psychedelics, they often followed one of two protocols. Large doses (e.g. 250 mcg of LSD) were used in one protocol, while lesser doses (30-200 mcg of LSD) were employed in the other. The protocol with smaller doses, called psycholytic therapy, was coupled with extended psychotherapy over multiple sessions. The doses were thought to allow deeper access to unconscious issues and past traumas (1,2).
Microdosing isn’t the same as psycholytic therapy. Instead, in microdosing, even smaller doses (e.g. 10-30 mcg) of psychedelics (typically LSD and psilocybin, but occasionally others) are used on a longer-term basis (e.g. weeks) according to a schedule (more on that below). It is also typically done outside the context of therapy, with people doing it on their own. The sensory effects of microdosing are supposed to be imperceptible. According to those who do it, microdosing is done for the following reasons (in no particular order) (3-6):
Performance/productivity enhancement
Mood enhancement
Cognitive performance enhancement
Creativity enhancement
Treatment of health conditions
Self-fulfillment
Coping with negative situations
Increasing social connection
Improving mental health
Improving personal/spiritual development
Improving mindfulness
Curiosity
But does it work?
There haven’t been any clinical trials done on microdosing, but there have been some lab studies, self-report community studies, and multiple reviews of this work (6-9). A recent thorough and systematic review found that several lines of evidence reveal some true benefits of microdosing on cognitive processing and mental health (especially depression and anxiety). In particular, self-report studies have indicated beneficial changes in specific attentional capacities, such as increases in absorption and decreased mind wandering. In other words, the person is better able to focus on the task at hand. An increase in self-reported well-being and insight were also reported, as well as positive personality changes and a greater connection to nature (9). Other benefits include self-reported psychological resilience (10), emotional stability (10), and improved mood and reduced depression scores (11).
Effects that were found in both self-report and lab-controlled studies include altered time perception, pain tolerance, and changes in conscious state (9). Importantly, some effects that were found in self-report studies have not been confirmed in lab studies, such as improvements to mood, social connection, emotional processing, energy, and concentration. However, it is worth noting that all lab-controlled studies only examined acute effects of microdosing, as in effects that emerged the same day as the experiment, whereas effects found in self-report studies may indicate benefits arising from the prolonged use of microdosing. Just like it takes anti-depressants a while to kick in (usually at least a month), it might take a while to see the more profound changes that microdosing elicits. So, just because lab-controlled studies haven’t yet found an effect, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
What do microdosers say about the experience?
“Since microdosing mushrooms, I definitely feel as though a ‘mental fog’ has been lifted and this allows me to be much more productive and functional.” (12)
“I had a great day! Very calm mind, emotionally in balance.” (12)
“Before microdosing I would have never said I have mental health issues, but I am forced to reconsider as when microdosing I feel I’m living in the brain of an incredibly mentally healthy person.” (12)
“I feel more open to other people. At home with my family, I feel better equipped to deal with disagreement, and my emotional reactions are less automatic. My mood improves, and I have better contact with my feelings and less restlessness. I more often take the initiative to talk.” (12)
“I get bright moods, good introspection in meditation, and a generally meditative, contemplative mood.” (12)
Is it just the placebo effect? According to several recent studies, the benefits of microdosing may be entirely due to expectation (10,13). However, a recent review proposed multiple reasons why this may not be the case, including that the expectation effects in those studies were small (for scientists reading this, expectation effects only accounted for a small percentage of the variance, with the main effects showing large effect sizes from baseline to outcome), expectation didn’t always correctly correspond to performance (for instance, expecting to be more creative did not make users necessarily more creative), and the studies may have had ineffective doses in a large proportion of their populations (see Politi 2022 for full analysis). Additionally, one study found that the effects believed most likely to change were unrelated to the observed pattern of reported outcomes (14). At the recent ESPD55 conference hosted by the McKenna Academy, mycologist Paul Stamets presented new (as of yet unpublished) evidence for microdosing’s objective effects. He presented data that showed a substantial improvement after microdosing on a motor-skilled test, a test not influenced by a subject’s personal expectations.
And although this is anecdotal (and mostly just funny), there’s this story of a Canadian Senator who was battling depression and PTSD, and curiously found himself in a better than usual mood over the course of a few weeks. After mentioning it to his wife, he discovered that she had been secretly spiking his morning coffee with microdoses of psilocybin. So, there’s that.
How to microdose? I will just link here to a site that discusses various protocols. The two most popular are the Fadiman protocol (from Dr. James Fadiman’s The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide (15)) and the Stamet’s Stack (from mycologist Paul Stamets).
Improvements in mental health, productivity, and creativity may not be the only benefits of microdosing. Many psychedelic substances act on 5-HT2A receptors (i.e. serotonin) and have been shown to enhance neural plasticity and neurogenesis (16), which could potentially be relevant for a number of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s Disease and dementia (17,18). Trials are currently underway, and the implications for beneficial effects are great.
Although the concept of microdosing may appear bizarre/extreme/harmful to some, we should remember that we use stimulants on a daily basis in the form of coffee and tea. Which stimulants are deemed appropriate and acceptable is simply a matter of cultural context. There’s already evidence of positive receptivity in populations you wouldn’t normally associate with psychedelics. This week, a military leader told me, “I’d rather have my guys microdosing mushrooms than finishing off a 12-pack of beer nightly.”
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