Authors of Largest Microdosing Study Suggest Benefits Limited To Dosing Day
The perceived benefits of microdosing LSD or psilocybin may only last for dosing day and not persist for long term effects, says Dr. Michelle St. Pierre, the lead author of the largest study on microdosers ever conducted.
Nearly 10 million people in the U.S. microdosed psilocybin, LSD, or MDMA last year, according to a recent estimate by the RAND Foundation. The practice of microdosing, taking a small amount of a psychedelic, has gained considerable interest as a wellness technology, with searches for the term dramatically increasing since 2015.
Common microdosing protocols, notably the Stamets and Fadiman protocols, are designed with non-dosing days to make the most out of potential tolerance windows for psychedelic materials and to relish in the afterglow effects many users report. “After reading a lot of reports and talking to a lot of people, the effects were lasting for up to two days,” microdosing researcher James Fadiman told The Cut.
Surprisingly, however, the recent study published in Psychopharmacology calls into question whether those afterglow effects are as powerful as commonly believed. The study, which drew from the daily diaries of 1,435 microdosers, found that people consistently self-reported higher creativity, productivity, wellbeing, focus, contemplation, and connectedness on dosing days, but no statistically significant improvements were reported on other days. There were also no lasting improvements found at the end of the month.
“This paper with survey data confirms what researchers have found in controlled double-blind studies,” says Harriet de Wit, a microdosing researcher at the University of Chicago. “That is, very small doses of [a] psychedelic drug produce mild stimulant-like effects acutely, or while the drug is acting on the brain, but there is limited (or no) evidence that it has long lasting beneficial effects on mood or cognition.”
The researchers only analyzed the data of people who microdosed LSD or psilocybin, which predominated the study in which more than 80% of the subjects microdosed psilocybin. The researchers did not analyze the data of those who microdosed other substances due to small sample sizes.
The results could suggest alternatives for the clinical applications of microdosing, which is increasingly sought to treat mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. In particular, the researchers conclude that the “observed benefits of microdosing appeared to depend on daily administration,” much like taking a daily dose of an SSRI; a more established psychiatric medication. Researchers point out, however, that the risks of such a protocol for psychedelics are unknown.
St. Pierre says she now views microdosing as something like a vitamin supplement or cup of coffee rather than something that could be expected to eliminate a mental health condition over time.
At the same time, St. Pierre adds that she is not sure if microdosing research “has had its fair chance yet.” Controlled studies that are informed by psychedelics’ unique effects such as their influence by set and setting – which would require creative changes to typical trial design – could reveal deeper findings than existing double-blind studies or survey studies, says St. Pierre.
Study Design
Amy Reichelt, a neuroscientist from the University of Adelaide, believes that the state of microdosing research is in flux. “Non-blinded and naturalistic studies (self-reports) often describe positive subjective effects such as improved mood, focus, creativity, and wellbeing for users,” says Reichelt. “However, more rigorously blinded and placebo-controlled trials tend to show smaller or inconsistent effects, sometimes indistinguishable from placebo.”
Unlike research on larger doses of psychedelics that produce longer experiences, microdosing studies commenced in the 2010s. As recently as 2019 there were only four research papers on microdosing. The first placebo-controlled microdosing trial was published in 2021, which suggested that the anecdotal benefits of microdosing could be explained by the placebo effect. According to a recent systematic review, the dozens of microdosing papers since then have found patterns of findings based on experimental design rather than conclusive evidence on microdosing as a whole, with the added caveat that, like research with higher doses, individual experiences appear to vary and be influenced by set and setting.
This survey study included an international cohort of microdosers recruited through Microdose.me, a survey data collection project led by Dr. Zachary Walsh of the University of British Columbia.
Each morning at 9 am, the individuals in this study were asked if they microdosed that day (or the previous day, to correct for missed days). They were also asked what substance they microdosed, their dosage, and questions to self-rate attributes like their creativity and focus. Participants were also given a baseline assessment before they proceeded with the daily diary which queried their mental health and history of psychedelic use. People could participate as long as they wished, with the average microdoser responding for 41 days.
Beyond the main finding that microdosing only affected microdosers on dosing day, the authors also found novel points of curiosity. People who have previously had larger doses of psychedelics, such as at a typical recreational dose, scored themselves higher in their creativity on dosing day than people who have only tried microdosing. St. Pierre says they are unsure what to make of this finding – perhaps there is a booster effect of microdosing after having had bigger experiences, but they are not yet sure.
The authors also found that people who said they took niacin and lion’s mane in conjunction with psilocybin – common additives with the Stamets stack – scored no differently on any of the measures. But this does not mean there was no effect, St. Pierre says; it means they did not find an effect with the measures in this study. There could be other domains that stacking could possibly be beneficial for, such as cognition and learning, which were commonly reported motivating factors her team found in previous research.
St. Pierre acknowledges there are limitations to this study; for example, they offered no compensation for participating in the study, and so their cohort are inherently enthusiastic enough about psychedelics to contribute to a daily diary with no compensation. But St. Pierre argues that the placebo effect shouldn’t be heavily controlled for, but instead worked within psychedelic trial design, because people’s expectations – their mindset – is exactly what could make the drug work differently.
“Expectancy is a huge one that comes up time and again,” St. Pierre says. “Expectancies are an important part of medicine. Why would we do something if we didn’t think it worked? And people who have previously microdosed, based on our research and other research say, ‘yeah, it works.’ And so then they take the microdose again.”
Carving out expectancies in research trial design, such as asking people how likely they believe microdosing will work and then statistically correcting for their higher scores, could be cutting out a unique interaction psychedelics have with the placebo effect, she says.
“There’s a lot of different opinions on expectancies in the field,” said St. Pierre, noting there are “some very conservative people who would say we need to 100% control for expectancies; we need all these placebo designs.” St. Pierre says she disagrees with that. “I think that those could actually confound the pharmacological effects.”
Reichelt, who has conducted research on micro dosing, agrees with St. Pierre. “The authors have an important point that the expectancy and prior experience of psychedelics may be part of the causal pathway to improved mental health, not simply confounds,” Reichelt says. “This resonates with psychotherapy mechanisms and the neuroscience of the placebo effect.”
St. Pierre and de Wit note there could be subtle perceptual and biological changes not detectable by current measures. For example, previous research on LSD microdosing found changes in unusually measured traits such as ‘feeling jittery’.
Science vs. Anecdote
Researcher Jim Fadiman, who popularized microdosing and helped design the Microdose.me project, suggests great caution in interpreting these results. He notes that the authors analyzed the survey results of people who were already engaged in a microdosing practice. Therefore, says Fadiman, we do not know if microdosing was not benefitting them in the days after as suggested by this study. According to Fadiman, these study subjects may already be in a cycle of a long-lasting improvement due to microdosing and therefore the days after could be “less” and not “zero” effect compared to their true baseline.
Fadiman believes that the only way to examine this would be to assess the baseline of non-microdosers and what the effect of the psychedelic is, on the whole, with these people compared with their baseline. Indeed, previous research led by the same lab which conducted this microdosing study tracked both psilocybin microdosers and non-microdosers over one month and did, in fact, find improvements in microdosers’ mood and mental health in one month compared to when they entered the study.
Fadiman also notes from his personal correspondence that many people who’ve tried microdosing daily found the experience to be too intense; “nobody in the last 10 or 12 years has recommended that taking it every day is a better method.” He says there is room for adjustment, but that individuals will always need to explore what works best for them. Regarding his own protocol of microdosing every third day, Fadiman says, “I don’t think it’s the best, really. My feeling is that probably every other day would be fine, except for people for whom it’s too much.”
Lucid News talked with a microdoser who asked to be known as Chad to protect his privacy. When Chad was asked how microdosing affected him, he said his experience of microdosing psilocybin is in line with what this survey suggests. He experienced improved mood and empathy, most detectable on dosing day. During the last time he was regularly microdosing, he needed to wake up at 2:30 a.m. for his job. He said he would feel a mild boost from the previous day in those early mornings, but come daytime, the boost had worn off completely and it felt like a regular day for him. He also said that, despite having previous experience with large psychedelic doses, he didn’t believe they contributed a noticeable booster effect on his creativity when he microdosed.
Chad says that by the end of one month of microdosing, his creativity and mood were similar to when he started microdosing. But he did emphasize improvements to an attribute not measured in this study: the month of microdosing gave him a higher baseline of awareness of himself. This speaks to St. Pierre’s suggestion that microdosing research needs further investigations to determine how, precisely, it impacts a range of people, and how usage patterns influence those effects.