A rigorous study has intriguing results
You’ve probably heard about microdosing, the “productivity hack” popular among Silicon Valley engineers and business leaders. Microdosers take regular small doses of LSD or magic mushrooms. At these doses, they
A rigorous study has intriguing results
You’ve probably heard about microdosing, the “productivity hack” popular among Silicon Valley engineers and business leaders. Microdosers take regular small doses of LSD or magic mushrooms. At these doses, they don’t experience mind-bending, hallucinatory trips, but they say they get a jolt in creativity and focus that can elevate work performance, help relationships, and generally improve a stressful and demanding daily life. If its proponents are to be believed, microdosing offers the cure for an era dominated by digital distractions and existential anxiety—a cup of coffee with a little Tony Robbins stirred in.
So far, though, it’s been impossible to separate truth from hype. That’s because, until recently, microdoses haven’t been tested in placebo-controlled trials. Late last year, the first placebo-controlled microdose trial was published. The study concluded that microdoses of LSD appreciably altered subjects’ sense of time, allowing them to more accurately reproduce lapsed spans of time. While it doesn’t prove that microdoses act as a novel cognitive enhancer, the study starts to piece together a compelling story on how LSD alters the brain’s perceptive and cognitive systems in a way that could lead to more creativity and focus.
The idea behind microdosing traces its roots back decades. In the 1950s, a handful of psychedelic therapists at a mental health facility in Saskatchewan wanted to help alcoholics get clean. They guided the patients through a high-dose, ego-dissolving, LSD experience. When they came out the other side, over half of the patients reported complete recovery from alcoholism. The Canadian government was intrigued and ordered more rigorous trials, this time with placebo controls, and without the experienced “trip guides” offering suggestions on what patients should feel. These trials were a bust. In the fallout, many viewed psychedelic therapy as more shamanism than science. The mindset of the user and suggestion from the therapist (termed “set and setting” to LSD proponents) are just as important as the drug itself. In other words, LSD’s effects had as much to do with goings on outside the brain as inside it. To LSD proponents, though, this was part of how it worked. “Set and setting” guard against a bad trip (with large doses), and give the user an idea of what they should experience.
Microdosing is born from this “set and setting” school of psychedelic therapy and one of its intellectual progeny, James Fadiman. The Stanford-trained Fadiman has worked with psychedelics for decades and runs a kind of cottage industry around espousing their powers. In his 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and at a conference talk that same year, Fadiman laid out the concept of microdosing. To microdose, one was to take a dose roughly 1/10th of a trip-inducing dose (10 micrograms of LSD) every three or four days, and go about their daily life.
Most of what’s known about the benefits of microdosing comes from self-reports Fadiman collected (and continues to collect) where microdosers descr