In recent years, the benefits of psychedelics in a therapeutic setting have become well-studied, but what about the benefits of microdosing psychedelics? Microdosing is just what it sounds like – tiny doses of the active compound that produce sub-perceptual effects. Many swear by it, claiming it enhances focus, creativity, and mood, among other benefits. So I decided to put it to the test. Here’s what happened.
TRANSCRIPT:
Psychedelics research has been going through a renaissance of sorts over the last couple of decades.
After their discovery by the hippies in the 50s and 60s, psychedelics like psilocybin became victims of Nixon’s war on drugs in the 1970s – it was reclassified as a Schedule 1 drug in October of 1970 as part of the Controlled Substances Act.
Schedule 1 basically says that it has no medical benefit and has a high likelihood of abuse.
This meant no federal funding for psychedelic research but also it kinda makes it hard for researchers to get access to the drug when they could go to jail for buying it.
It wouldn’t be until the year 2000 that regulatory approval was given to a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins University to conduct studies on healthy volunteers who had no experience with psychedelics.
So yeah, research was basically on hold for 30 years, or at least it was all kinda underground and anecdotal.
This study basically showed that psilocybin mushrooms can affect spiritual experiences that are on par with the kind of mystical experiences people have in spiritual settings; church, seances, drum circles, that kind of thing.
And this research opened the floodgates to more serious research from universities across the United States, and the funny thing about it is, it wasn’t necessarily for its therapeutic effects – though it did conclude that it was helpful for that – but it was its spiritual effects that made people take the research more seriously.
How on-brand is that for the United States?
But it was kind-of a stroke of genius that they made that the centerpiece of their paper because nobody’s going to argue against religious fervor in this country.
By 2008, the Johns Hopkins group had outlined some safety guidelines for researching psychedelics, which laid the groundwork for further testing.
But yeah, in the following years, more and more research was done that showed that psychedelics helped people quit smoking and drinking and all kinds of other addictions.
Research showed that psychedelics can help cancer patients deal with existential anxiety and it can help with major depressive issues and PTSD.
All of this by the way was being done with private money and donations, none of this was done with federal grants UNTIL in 2020, the National Institutes of Health awarded a series of research grants, which was the first time that was allowed in over 50 years.
So research is ongoing, and there’s more of it than ever before and one of the things they’ve found in that research is exactly which part of the brain these compounds are affecting.
They were able to show through fMRI imaging that psilocybin and other psychedelics affect an area called the claustrum.
They say that the claustrum is the area of the brain responsible for setting attention and switching tasks. But more colloquially, it’s said that this is where the brain’s “ego” is located, this is the part of the brain that gives us a sense of self.
The claustrum is hidden deep down inside the brain and has tendrils that go out and connect with lots of different areas, so it kinda touches a lot of the various different modules of the brain and affects how they think.
I would refer you to the split brain experiments video that I did that talks about how we really do have several semi-conscious modules operating in our brains at all times, well the claustrum kinda connects with all those and provides a coherent sense of “This is who I am, this is how I think, this is what I do”
And it’s thought that by tamping down the activity in the claustrum, it kinda removes that sense of self and causes you to feel more connected to other people. Which is one of the effects of psychedelics, people report feeling connected to all things because their normally all-important “ego” has been temporarily dissolved.
Some call this “ego death” which is kind of extreme but whatever.
So it’s easy to see why that feeling of connection and that sort-of bypassing of all of our hangups that are associated with our egos and sense of self; it’s easy to see how that could create a mystical or spiritual experience, but from a therapeutic standpoint, it basically just removes the guardrails that we’ve built up in our mind; the defenses that we’ve installed over the years to protect
ourselves from painful emotions and memories, it basically just tears all that down so you can actually access and deal with the root causes of your problems.
It’s important to note that set and setting plays a big part of this experience. Because your brain is more open and more susceptible to external stimuli.
If you’re in a place where you feel safe, and especially if there’s someone you trust there to guide you, obviously that’s the most ideal, but if you’re in a heightened, stressful situation, you know, you might cook your brain.
This is where the comments get flooded with, “This is bullshit, I was tripping balls at a GWAR concert when a pack of knife-wielding clowns tied me up and threw me in the trunk of a car and drove me off a cliff into the ocean. I barely made it out alive and it was the scariest moment of my life but I turned out just fine! The demon in my toothbrush told me so!”
There are several compounds that can have these effects, I’m talking about psilocybin quite a bit here but there’s also LSD, MDMA, DMT and Salvinorin A, they all produce similar effects… And different effects. You can share your experiences in the comments.
And that’s the general idea around psychedelics. I could go a lot deeper but this video is really about microdosing psychedelics. So what’s that about?
Well, as they say, the dose makes the poison. If you take 2 or 3 ibuprofen, that’s not a problem. If you take a whole bottle… you might need a new liver.
Hell if you take too much water, you could die from it.
Similarly, a snake bite could kill you but if you just have a tiny amount of it, you might build up a resistance. And it actually can have positive benefits, which is a whole video for another time.
But the same is true for mushrooms, if you take 2 or 3 grams… you might see some swirlies on the wall, you might feel like hugging someone, you might think that your dog just sitting on the couch is the funniest thing that’s ever happened in the history of the planet.
Whereas if you take 5 to 7 grams, you might get to walk through the forest holding hands with God.
So the idea is what if we took that dose WAY down, down so low that you don’t have any of the hallucinogenic effects and can still work and function. Could you still get the benefits of that suppression of the claustrum?
The increased connectivity, the feeling of closeness with others, reduced anxiety, and all that.
That’s the idea behind microdosing, and its proponents swear by it.
So microdosing gained in popularity maybe about 10 years ago in the tech bro and personal development circles of the internet – Nootropics became a big thing, people wanting to superpower their brains and productivity, and this was just another way of doing that.
Every other podcast had someone talking about how it gave them superhuman focus and helped with creative problem solving, but these were all anecdotal stories, we were still lagging in actual studies.
But once the studies started coming in, we finally got… no answers.
Or I should say, we got answers, but they were a lot of different answers, so nothing definitive.
In a 2019 paper from Macquarrie University in Sydney Australia, they conducted a couple of different studies, the first one was described as a systematic, observational investigation of 98 microdosing participants, who provided daily ratings of psychological functioning over a six week period.
Of those 98, 63 of them did a battery of tests at the beginning and at the end, measuring things like mood, attention, wellbeing, mystical experiences, personality, creativity, and sense of agency
All of this revealed a general increase in psychological functioning on dosing days, but limited evidence on the off days.
And the before and after study tests showed reductions in levels of depression and stress; lower levels of distractibility, and increased information absorption; but also increased neuroticism.
So mostly good results, but they became concerned that expectancy bias may have messed with the results a bit because many of the participants were pulled from online communities that discuss microdosing so they had been exposed to all kinds of anecdotal stories of people having the same kind of results they were claiming to have.
So yeah, they were looking for these effects, so like anything else if you look for something, you’re likely to find it.
So to try to rule that out, they had a group of 263 participants, some of them were experienced microdosers and some were brand new, and had them do a survey to gauge what kind of results they would expect to get from microdosing, just to see if that lined up with their original results.
And the result is… a mixed bag. Some of it lined up perfectly with the results. But some results like the absorption and neuroticism, nobody predicted.
That’s not to say that the “expected” stuff wasn’t real… just that it may have been affected by the person’s expectation.
The main conclusion of the study was that there needs to be more studies.
And there were more studies, in 2022, a team from the University of British Columbia conducted the largest study of its kind at the time, having 935 participants microdose psilocybin for 30 days.
Kinda like the first study, they had them note psychological markers along the way and while they saw a difference in results amongst age groups, with 55 and older not having the same level of effects, they ended the study with this:
“the comparability of our findings with those of prior research from diverse locations and with different methodologies suggests a relatively consistent association between microdosing and improved mental health.”
This was described as a “naturalistic, observational” study, which has its merits, but you could describe it as a very large collection of anecdotal evidence, in a controlled manner. What we’re really looking for is a double-blind, placebo controlled study. And we got that literally one month later.
In August of 2022, a team from the University of Buenos Aires recruited 34 volunteers to test the effects of half a gram of dried mushrooms, testing its effects on subjective experience, behavior, creativity (divergent and convergent thinking), perception, cognition, and brain activity.
They actually hooked participants to an EEG machine to measure the effects.
What they found was that the effects were significantly more intense for the people who took the active dose vs the ones on placebo… but there’s a catch.
It was only more intense for the people who figured out they weren’t on placebo. I guess some felt enough that they could tell they were on it and some couldn’t, and the ones who didn’t know didn’t report the same positive effects.
Oh, and those EEG results, they showed reduced activity in the theta band, but this also correlated to whether or not they knew they were taking the mushrooms.
So they chalk it all up to expectation bias.
The point is, there’s still some researching to go. And there’s probably going to be more opportunity for research because psilocybin mushrooms are becoming more legal than they used to be.
Just in the last few years, psilocybin mushrooms have seen a wave of decriminalizations in the United States.
In 2020, mushrooms were decriminalized in Denver, Santa Cruz and Oakland in California, and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Decriminalized isn’t the same as legal, it just means it’s not a high priority and the punishments aren’t as severe.
Anyway, over the next two years, we saw it get decriminalized in Oregon, Washington DC, Seattle, and 3 cities in Massachussetts (Somerville, Northampton, Cambridge)
In November 2022, Colorado passed the Natural Medicine Health Act, which decriminalized psylocybin, DMT, ibogane and mescaline, and legalized healing centers where people can use the drugs while under therapeutic supervision
In 2023, a bill in California, Senate Bill 58, would have decriminalized it, but it was vetoed by Gavin Newsome – wants to establish some more safeguards in the bill.
But these are still just a handful of states and federally, it is still classified as a schedule 1 drug, at any and all amounts. Which, I’ll be honest – it’s making me a little nervous about this video.
I’m just doing a science.
But this is also confusing because I don’t know about you but I see ads for mushroom gummies everywhere. Like, gummies and drinks, everywhere I look there’s some new “relaxing” or “mood-enhancing” product in my social media.
Well it turns out most of these aren’t powered by psilocybin, they’re using different mushrooms like Amanita muscaria, which has the hallucinogenic compound muscimol.
And some of them use derivatives of psilocybin, kind-of like you can use delta-9 products that are derived from THC, so they kinda skirt the law that way. You’ll often see on these products, they list a “proprietary blend” of mushrooms so it’s kinda cagey, it’s hard to know exactly what’s in them.
But yeah, when it comes to psilocybin itself, even if you’re just microdosing, this is, technically, illegal. So I can’t recommend anybody do it
BUT, if you’ve been curious about it but were concerned about the illegality of it, this was my experience—sorry… My alleged experience.
But again, I have to stress, if you’re going to do this, talk to your doctor about it, especially if you’re already on psychoactive drugs, and again, this is not legal. So don’t get yourself in trouble.
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