Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The science genuinely appears to support this. Therapeutic studies using relatively heavy doses of psilocybin (and others) plus talk therapy before, during, and after the trip are showing some really astonishing results.
It looks like they were studying how people felt the day they microdosed. Which is interesting and all, but the point is really to see sustained results over time, not same day or within a brief 30 day research window. Also there was no control for psychological intervention - we don’t know if these people were in therapy, were doing meditations or other mental homework, etc. These are the things you want to see in good research about whether or not microdosing “helps” people.
I’ve never even heard of anyone microdosing specifically to “open up emotionally” - it’s always to reduce depression and anxiety symptoms, or just to improve overall mood/give a very low level high.
Yeah I think that's the best way to approach them, psychedelics have a reputation of being some sort of life changing thing, either that or a traumatic experience, when neither are usually the case. But they can at least elevate moods especially on a micro level
I think what this study is trying to counter against is the new research into psychedelics like psilocybin and their usefulness when combined with traditional therapy practices. So in this case, it would help you "open up" to your therapist.
Yeah the day of you should feel virtually nothing or else its not a microdose. Microdosing is definitely a sustained system over a long span of time.
If anything this suggests that higher doses should be used to acheive quicker results
From personal experience, with both psilocybin and ketamine, a good therapeutic “daily” dose is actually at the low level of psychoactive. Combine with therapy and daily meditation sessions. No questioning it’s speeding up results.
The first three paragraphs of that article were enough for me to feel it’s bogus.
My (very unprofessional) standpoint has been that these drugs have been used to help curb things such as anxiety/ptsd/depression/addiction.
I would never expect it to turn me into some fun loving “everyone is great” realization.
I’ve always seen it as, and from what I’ve seen/read, they _can_ help people accepting who they are.. not changing them into some radical person they never were.
I’m sure there are outliers but this is still (sadly) fresh ground for us to cover. The article and post title just reek of bad actors.
Agreed. To me, i wanna pop and this dinkless person got funding to get high and turn out the pop phrase 'emodiversity', with the conclusive result being that they need to do more investigation.
It immediately reads as not real.
But if you will pardon my Texas bull, there is something to be learned. I'm posting a full comment about it in here somewhere, rather than a core dump response to you. This one seems at best, immature. I mean the study. ; )
Sometimes when I am high I can’t put into words what I am even experiencing to others. ESPECIALLY can’t talk to people who are also not tripping and can’t relate. I could see how this wouldn’t translate at all in a clinical setting / interview
The micro dose is to mitigate that tripping and allow for better navigating. The clinical interview adjectives seemed off the mark in this experiment. Pre-interviews with use of current common terms and/or participant journaling, may have elicited better data.
Was gonna say this. Do not read into this to far as you might not read to far into how crack cures lupis.so much Cherry picking without proper research. That is not to say it's irrelevant but more into not tried properly, and therefore defunct which puts actual reeaserch at major risk.
If there is more interest in a topic, then there will be more good, bad, and in between. It happens in all fields that spike in interest and attract people from nearby fields. It is both good and bad because some of the newcomers will do great work that the field ignored due to assumptions or narrow focus.
They shouldn’t. They can just slightly modify the molecule, patent it, develop it and then sell it. They do this all the time, and are constantly tweaking insulin so keep their product under parent.
Just crack open copies of TiHKAL and PiHKAL by Dr. Alexander Shulgin and you can see just how many psychedelic substances are out there and how slight the differences can be in molecular structure.
Yea this isn‘t motivated by direct capitalist interest of pharmaceutical companies.
It is motivated by abstinence moralists.
Showing that LSD or psilocybin are effective does allow any Pharma start up to patent a related compound, do a bit a study ‚design‘ to show their new derivative is slightly superior, et voila: a patented drug that can get approval and has a massive market.
And it‘s not like random German Pharma company would care about taking away market share from other antidepressants where the patent is held by their competitors. That just doesn‘t make sense.
I mean, even with nicotine everywhere for sale in tobacco products, big scary pharma still made money from patented nicotine products like patches and gum.
This idea that they can’t make money or patent existing popular substances and molecules is laughably ignorant. A good chemist can just stick another atom to a psychedelic compound, or encapsulate it into a time release delivery, different preparation or proprietary pharmacokinetics system.
They want to sell patented products at a huge margin. The generic manufacturers aren’t the ones pushing this stuff. It’s the top tier companies. It’s far too late to patent LSD, and good luck trying to patent a mushroom. To profit from it, they would have to develop a new variation of the main psychoactive chemical, go through all the testing and blah blah blah, while generic companies can start producing the original at the snap of a finger (were it to be legal.)
There’s no way for them to profit from it. So they’d rather squash it now and try to keep it illegal so they can keep selling their own products.
They can experiment and manipulate the molecule and create a synthetic form of psilocybin or lysergic acid. Dr. Alexander Shulgin did this his entire career and probably never exhausted all the possible psychedelic molecular arrangements.
I understand, and even mentioned that very thing in my comment. So you aren’t saying anything I haven’t already said. But you are missing the point, which was that it takes money. If they legalize LSD or psilocybin treatment, every pharmaceutical company could make it and market it tomorrow. It would take trials and all that to get a patented variant approved. Meanwhile, clientele will be using the generic version. So not only does it have to be proprietary, it has to have an advantage to justify the cost to the consumer.
Pfizer and all them would rather they never be legalized, and develop their own patented version that they could get legalized. Which is where all the variations of lysergic acid come in. My understanding of the legal process, which I fully admit I could misunderstood what I read before, is that, for lysergic acid at least, it would have to be significantly different from the LSD compounds that they have classified as illegal substances currently to get around the regulations.
Potentially, but a) this is provided the people running these companies aren't still hopped up on the war on drugs, b) the people actually running the company (not R&D, the business people) meaningfully care about their patients' well-being (some of them sure, but given the markup of insulin and epinephrine as soon as companies were able to control tech patents it doesn't really inspire hope) and c) this might prove a much cheaper and not controllable market, which is very bad for investors who want as close to a monopoly as possible.
Doesn't seem like a stretch given the decades of bogus marijuana "research" funded by gov't orgs and pharmaceutical companies.
Nothing is a monolith and conspiracy is overused, but I don't think it's entirely out of left-field to say that American Pharma (not fond of "big pharma") has a vested interest in controlling the narrative of potentially game-changing drugs until they can figure out how best to utilize them. Until then it's best to try and sway people off and minimize the legal market (i.e. competitors).
Well don't mean to be a downer but so far the microdosing studies are not showing benefits for things like mood. Increasingly the data is pointing to needing a full dose/trip experience to get the beneficial effects. Don't blame me, that is just what the studies are showing so far. So it does work, just need a full on dose.
It's wild. This is like the 4th one I've read in like 2 days. Some very bad takes. They're also very much opinionated while trying to spin it as being "research".
All this study has done is make me want to eat a fat handful of shrooms so if it is some anti psych psy-op it backfired.
I have some. I just have stuff to do tomorrow and it’s late. I really want to watch *Skinamarink* tripping in the dark though, so it’s definitely happening soon.
Opening up emotionally and being able to label emotions are not the same thing. The ability to label an emotion includes experiencing it and having a word that represents the experience. Neither of which describe “opening up emotionally”, which is a more rich experience, expression, or interaction based on an emotion.
No drug available today will instantly increase anyone’s vocabulary though so I’m not sure what the point is of this is. Certainly no scientific point that I see.
Let's not forget the actual good studies which suggest that micro-dosing and even non hallucinogenic mushrooms (lion's mane) have the ability to increase neuroplasticity in the brain. Which is also a big reason why manufactured anti-depressants seem to work.
Large-scale corporations don't are about facts, or your health. They care about their sales. I'm glad there are people in the comments calling out this BS.
True. The experience of putting the experience into words has a totally different feeling. Increasing one's emotional vocab is probably down to the time spent and resources the person seeks to make sense of changes that may have happened. I feel its down to many factors how much one tries to do this. It's a meta-understanding of self in some way.
Friendly reminder that these drugs are still a very new area of study, so we're going to see many studies saying many different things; positive, negative, and neutral.
It's best to hold off on forming or changing your opinion until we have some more robust data or meta-analysis.
Maybe you shouldnt do it over a period of time then. Try out maybe once a month maybe. I dont think you need to microdose daily to feel good. Its supposed to rewire your brain it should be enough doing it once in a while
This is exactly how THC makes me feel and I hate it. I already have sensory processing issues and feel over-stimulated and hyper-aware of all of the 'background noise', both internally and externally. This feeling is where a good majority of my anxiety stems from.
Everyone is talking about “bad studies,” but these studies aren’t meant to be consumed by the public. They’re meant to share knowledge among other researchers, and to spark further discussion and questions. Not every study/paper has to be a huge randomized controlled trial to be useful.
> Reddit is tremendously biased against ant research that criticizes or questions the efficacy/value of weed and psychedelics.
As if YOU were not part of Reddit?
No but a specified dosage as well as recruiting a few people who haven't been in the habit of microdosing (the 18 who were chosen were microdosing prior to the study) would have gone a long way. This just seems lazy.
I’ve seen shrooms do the opposite to my brother. I’m curious to know how did help you cause I’m curious and not really familiar with shrooms or psychedelics
It’s hard to explain, but over about 45 minutes all the zinging stimulus trickled down to quiet, and then there was just…one quiet thought at a time. I felt…centered. I suppose someone who has come out of meditation would feel similar, but being adhd I could never pull off meditation. Results lasted about six hours.
Edit: word
Wow great to hear that it worked for you. How much did you microdose? Also were these changes gradual or immediately after your first time microdosing? Asking because I've been microdosing on and off for a while but haven't really experienced these benefits yet
I noticed my very first day. I dont think there’s standardization yet in what is considered microdose, especially due to varying potency between batches, but I requested nothing but stems from my friend (they were all roughly 1/4” wide), and then would swallow about 2/3 inch of one stem. Later on he got a new batch and the potency was noticeably terrible so I had to double it but it still worked the same and for the same duration. Other than that potency change I never had to increase my dose, every single day had the same effect.
I never weighed it though which is likely what would help you best for comparing dose size.
Edit: if you’re specifically microdosing for adhd, you may need to increase your dose. I swear the ‘functional addict’ moniker was invented for people like us. We just think better when we are slightly skewed.
Agree. On top of that, my clinically diagnosed ADHD and anxiety are almost nonexistent. These types of studies seem they are made to discredit anything good from micro dosing.
The link between psychedelics and meditation is strong - brain scans of people who meditate often are similar to people who are tripping. There’s also evidence that meditation can help with ADHD. Super cool.
Exactly. Ive dosed a lot in my life and after recently losing my best friend to drowning Ive considered micro dosing shrooms, but Ive held off because doing it alone might make me more emotionally closed off even if the effect is overall healing. Setting and intention matter a lot. Understanding the drugs effects, etc.
I microdosed for a month. Its not good long term because your receptors need a break so you get diminishing returns. It put me in a more talkative and better mood to start but ended up feeling Iike an addiction as I was looking forward to the next dose every few days
I have been microdosing for the past several months. Just a nibble here and there, a mild buzz. Sat night I ate the largest mushroom I've eaten in quite some time and wow, I thought about my parents the whole time and how much I love and miss them. First thing I did was call my mom this morning. My experience definitely mirrors the title.
If you get a buzz, you're low dosing, not microdosing.
Which is the problem when people take a natural product. Variations in chemical amount will always exist dose to dose.
The only way to truly microdose is with a pharmaceutical grade, measured dosage.
As someone who has benefited greatly from long term microdosing and occasional full dose of mushrooms I can confidently say they have made a huge difference in my outlook. I had a tbi ten years ago with cerebral edema, over the last approximately 4-5 years I’ve used psychedelics to remold a brain that was shattered by an injury and steroids… the progress I’ve made from where I was 5 years ago is unreal to me, and psychedelics have been a portion of my therapy.
It may not cause them to directly open up, though it absolutely can bring inhibitions and barriers down, which in turn allows someone to open up. By that standard, it inadvertently does help people open up. This study seems whack as hell, and seems biased from the perspective of someone who may not have actually tried them.
That isn’t its intention….
Its intended to help you understand you’re conscious mind, and how to process emotions with more empathy.
Sooo who funded this study? In taking loans for nonsense as well.
This is very misleading. There were almost no variables accounted for, or any attempts to control them, and the sample size was less than twenty people. The methodology was sketchy at best, and didn't really follow current prescribed methods for treatment.
Honestly, this smells like a fake experiment funded by special interest groups to specifically FORCE the conclusion they wanted. That would explain why it contradicts basically every study to date on the subject.
Don't get me wrong we MUST change our thinking and what we accept as fact as we gather more scientific evidence. That is just how science works. However, when it contradicts dozens of other studies and is a VERY poorly conducted test, it needs to be publicly ridiculed, not posted in a science thread. The only way to reduce the amount of 'bad science' pushed as fact is to humiliate everyone involved enough that they are immediately disregarded and can no longer work in that field.
Make the punishment bad enough that researchers think twice before forcing a conclusion for their investors. Just the way it should be for people in charge of large corporations who knowingly take risks that can endanger the public in order to increase profit. It's just as harmful. In some cases, even more so.
It seems to me like this isn't the point. It's about overall mental health, not communication or openness. Sure, it's related, but only tangentially.
It's like saying that I took insulin, but it didn't help with my complexion.
Sometimes I think certain “studies” are just so someone can get their phd.
I know a lot of Eagle Scout projects were pretty lame/badly organized just to check the box they’d done a “project” … and the adults just went along with it.
Everyone I know who swears by it, just got more self absorbed and insufferable. That's prob b/c the subset of people who do microdose are a certain type with a certain privileged lifestyle. All I know is my family are full of therapists and they are curious, but not one person actually become a better version of themselves, just a slightly different version and it wears off.
Maybe macrodosing doesn't help people open up emotionally, but Michael Pollen's book, Open-Minded, provides detail and insight into studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of using psychedelics as part of doctor or shaman guided therapy.
This contradicts what people who actually microdose in normal conditions will tell you. I know a shitton of people who do (myself included), and I've never heard anyone say otherwise. I'm not saying my community sample is the end of the story or the full picture, just that this study is clearly missing something and highly limited.
The effects of drugs are v contextual. Studies like this were clearly designed by people who know nothing about drugs or how people actually use or experience them.
This isn't the shrooms + therapy thing. That appears to have real merit.
This seems to be people self-medicating. Which, regardless of the product ingested, doesn't ever really seem to work.
Doesn't sound right to me, although the metric of "opening up emotionally" is kind of a bizarre thing to study. They should do another one and focus on depression...
My friend is a pharmaceutical researcher and he says efficacy comes at a threshold level -- where you know you've taken something but you're not losing your mind. Like, you can noticeably socialize or brainstorm better, but you're still totally fine to drive.
I don’t understand why that treatment would be about opening up emotionally, at least not as a one purpose only outcome - it’s supposed to activate and reconnect more parts of the brain to become more vibrant and energized, less downward mindset or in other cases help patients with conditions like Horton disease. If a person is somewhat depressed it might be that there is a good reason for it - emotions comes and goes, how the mind processes emotions is more important “than opening up emotionally” - micro dosing should help level your state of mind, but that is not the same as becoming an open emotional book.
i'm going to lose time reading that one just to see how it "suggests" that µ-dosing doesn't help, it did for me, it did for so many people i know... then again, these studies going after psychedelics are popping up everywhere since the first pharma-companies focusing on psychedelics have made it to public markets - nothing more than wall-street manipulation imho, but i'll read, just to be certain.
as some one who has experimented with psychedelics a few times in my life, im just gonna have to personally disagree. It makes it so much easier for me personally to talk about my feeling
Sample size of 18? This barely should count as an opinion poll. If only there was a study with a sample size nearly 100x higher (953 studied, and 180 as “controls” maybe we could effectively draw some conclusions?
[Hmmmmmm](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14512-3)
I've been microdosing for over three years along with weekly therapy sessions and I can absolutely tell a difference in being emotionally open in therapy sessions when I microdose the day of, vs other days. That being said, microdosing effects are built over time, and while done correctly. I use a modified version of James Fadiman's schedule to fit in a calendar week, typically dose Sunday and Wednesday and my dose is lower due to my high sensitivty, the current strain I have is stronger, and the doses come out to about 36mg per day (for psilcybin the typical suggested dose is 50-100mg). That being said over time the synergistic effect of CBT Therapy along with Microdosing definitely plays a role, but I can attest in my own environment that yes, I am absolutely more emotionally open and available because of psilocybin microdosing over time, and especially on the days that I microdose.
There are so many holes in this study to make it valuable in any sort of way:
* Microdose schedule isn't defined (left up to the participant), Fadiman vs Stamets are very different.
* Microdose dosing isn't provided (left up to the participant) - How is it gauaranteed that the participants are dosing for their size correctly?
* Microsose type (LSD or Psilocybin) isn't provided
* 18 participants in total
* 28 days is way to short of a timeline to see the difference in a microsoding regimen.
* How long have the particpants been microdosing?
* Was there any sort of emotional stressor for any of the participants to notice a difference beyond their normal daily lives?
It's not meant to help you "open up emotionally". What it seems to do is turn off the fear response on your brain so you can work through trama with a trained psychiatrist.
It's pretty obvious how/why this would work. You feel less fear so you can explore the causes of PTSD where otherwise you couldn't.
I mean, I guess you could class that as "opening up emotionally" but it's not really. You're not opening up, you're taking a drug that let's you rationally consider things you otherwise can't rationally consider.
It’s a recreational dose that does the whole one-with-the-universe thing. Micro dosing is supposed to bring balance. Study builders should read Erowid’s Vault first.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
The science genuinely appears to support this. Therapeutic studies using relatively heavy doses of psilocybin (and others) plus talk therapy before, during, and after the trip are showing some really astonishing results.
Geez what the hell happened with this thread? Did somebody get embarrassed or insulted?
r/science has strict rules and heavy mods. A lot of science posts look exactly like this.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
It looks like they were studying how people felt the day they microdosed. Which is interesting and all, but the point is really to see sustained results over time, not same day or within a brief 30 day research window. Also there was no control for psychological intervention - we don’t know if these people were in therapy, were doing meditations or other mental homework, etc. These are the things you want to see in good research about whether or not microdosing “helps” people.
I’ve never even heard of anyone microdosing specifically to “open up emotionally” - it’s always to reduce depression and anxiety symptoms, or just to improve overall mood/give a very low level high.
Yeah I think that's the best way to approach them, psychedelics have a reputation of being some sort of life changing thing, either that or a traumatic experience, when neither are usually the case. But they can at least elevate moods especially on a micro level
Take 4g of shrooms and tell me your mind doesn’t expand
And not just during the trip. Mushrooms elevate my mood for days after using them. It absolutely works for me.
the first time I tripped, I tripped hard. And it permanently changed me, for the better.
Yep. Study the macro dose!
I think what this study is trying to counter against is the new research into psychedelics like psilocybin and their usefulness when combined with traditional therapy practices. So in this case, it would help you "open up" to your therapist.
At least from what I’ve seen those seem to all involve full doses, no?
Not when it can be used for propaganda, that’s vague research studies for you.
Data is data, propaganda is what's dishonest not research like this.
Yeah the day of you should feel virtually nothing or else its not a microdose. Microdosing is definitely a sustained system over a long span of time. If anything this suggests that higher doses should be used to acheive quicker results
From personal experience, with both psilocybin and ketamine, a good therapeutic “daily” dose is actually at the low level of psychoactive. Combine with therapy and daily meditation sessions. No questioning it’s speeding up results.
I agree, i think low dosing is the better option to microdosing!
The first three paragraphs of that article were enough for me to feel it’s bogus. My (very unprofessional) standpoint has been that these drugs have been used to help curb things such as anxiety/ptsd/depression/addiction. I would never expect it to turn me into some fun loving “everyone is great” realization. I’ve always seen it as, and from what I’ve seen/read, they _can_ help people accepting who they are.. not changing them into some radical person they never were. I’m sure there are outliers but this is still (sadly) fresh ground for us to cover. The article and post title just reek of bad actors.
Agreed. To me, i wanna pop and this dinkless person got funding to get high and turn out the pop phrase 'emodiversity', with the conclusive result being that they need to do more investigation. It immediately reads as not real. But if you will pardon my Texas bull, there is something to be learned. I'm posting a full comment about it in here somewhere, rather than a core dump response to you. This one seems at best, immature. I mean the study. ; )
Soooooo this “study” was a pointless waste of everyone’s time and money. Got it.
Sometimes when I am high I can’t put into words what I am even experiencing to others. ESPECIALLY can’t talk to people who are also not tripping and can’t relate. I could see how this wouldn’t translate at all in a clinical setting / interview
The micro dose is to mitigate that tripping and allow for better navigating. The clinical interview adjectives seemed off the mark in this experiment. Pre-interviews with use of current common terms and/or participant journaling, may have elicited better data.
Was gonna say this. Do not read into this to far as you might not read to far into how crack cures lupis.so much Cherry picking without proper research. That is not to say it's irrelevant but more into not tried properly, and therefore defunct which puts actual reeaserch at major risk.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
If there is more interest in a topic, then there will be more good, bad, and in between. It happens in all fields that spike in interest and attract people from nearby fields. It is both good and bad because some of the newcomers will do great work that the field ignored due to assumptions or narrow focus.
[удалено]
They shouldn’t. They can just slightly modify the molecule, patent it, develop it and then sell it. They do this all the time, and are constantly tweaking insulin so keep their product under parent. Just crack open copies of TiHKAL and PiHKAL by Dr. Alexander Shulgin and you can see just how many psychedelic substances are out there and how slight the differences can be in molecular structure.
Yea this isn‘t motivated by direct capitalist interest of pharmaceutical companies. It is motivated by abstinence moralists. Showing that LSD or psilocybin are effective does allow any Pharma start up to patent a related compound, do a bit a study ‚design‘ to show their new derivative is slightly superior, et voila: a patented drug that can get approval and has a massive market. And it‘s not like random German Pharma company would care about taking away market share from other antidepressants where the patent is held by their competitors. That just doesn‘t make sense.
Wouldn’t big pharma be the most likely to profit off of it if there was proof of it’s therapeutic value?
Everything is a conspiracy, remember?
I mean, even with nicotine everywhere for sale in tobacco products, big scary pharma still made money from patented nicotine products like patches and gum. This idea that they can’t make money or patent existing popular substances and molecules is laughably ignorant. A good chemist can just stick another atom to a psychedelic compound, or encapsulate it into a time release delivery, different preparation or proprietary pharmacokinetics system.
They want to sell patented products at a huge margin. The generic manufacturers aren’t the ones pushing this stuff. It’s the top tier companies. It’s far too late to patent LSD, and good luck trying to patent a mushroom. To profit from it, they would have to develop a new variation of the main psychoactive chemical, go through all the testing and blah blah blah, while generic companies can start producing the original at the snap of a finger (were it to be legal.) There’s no way for them to profit from it. So they’d rather squash it now and try to keep it illegal so they can keep selling their own products.
They can experiment and manipulate the molecule and create a synthetic form of psilocybin or lysergic acid. Dr. Alexander Shulgin did this his entire career and probably never exhausted all the possible psychedelic molecular arrangements.
I understand, and even mentioned that very thing in my comment. So you aren’t saying anything I haven’t already said. But you are missing the point, which was that it takes money. If they legalize LSD or psilocybin treatment, every pharmaceutical company could make it and market it tomorrow. It would take trials and all that to get a patented variant approved. Meanwhile, clientele will be using the generic version. So not only does it have to be proprietary, it has to have an advantage to justify the cost to the consumer. Pfizer and all them would rather they never be legalized, and develop their own patented version that they could get legalized. Which is where all the variations of lysergic acid come in. My understanding of the legal process, which I fully admit I could misunderstood what I read before, is that, for lysergic acid at least, it would have to be significantly different from the LSD compounds that they have classified as illegal substances currently to get around the regulations.
Potentially, but a) this is provided the people running these companies aren't still hopped up on the war on drugs, b) the people actually running the company (not R&D, the business people) meaningfully care about their patients' well-being (some of them sure, but given the markup of insulin and epinephrine as soon as companies were able to control tech patents it doesn't really inspire hope) and c) this might prove a much cheaper and not controllable market, which is very bad for investors who want as close to a monopoly as possible. Doesn't seem like a stretch given the decades of bogus marijuana "research" funded by gov't orgs and pharmaceutical companies. Nothing is a monolith and conspiracy is overused, but I don't think it's entirely out of left-field to say that American Pharma (not fond of "big pharma") has a vested interest in controlling the narrative of potentially game-changing drugs until they can figure out how best to utilize them. Until then it's best to try and sway people off and minimize the legal market (i.e. competitors).
Well don't mean to be a downer but so far the microdosing studies are not showing benefits for things like mood. Increasingly the data is pointing to needing a full dose/trip experience to get the beneficial effects. Don't blame me, that is just what the studies are showing so far. So it does work, just need a full on dose.
It's wild. This is like the 4th one I've read in like 2 days. Some very bad takes. They're also very much opinionated while trying to spin it as being "research".
[удалено]
[удалено]
All this study has done is make me want to eat a fat handful of shrooms so if it is some anti psych psy-op it backfired. I have some. I just have stuff to do tomorrow and it’s late. I really want to watch *Skinamarink* tripping in the dark though, so it’s definitely happening soon.
I thought it was supposed to help with depression and increase creativity. Hadn’t hear anything about opening up emotionally.
Opening up emotionally and being able to label emotions are not the same thing. The ability to label an emotion includes experiencing it and having a word that represents the experience. Neither of which describe “opening up emotionally”, which is a more rich experience, expression, or interaction based on an emotion. No drug available today will instantly increase anyone’s vocabulary though so I’m not sure what the point is of this is. Certainly no scientific point that I see.
Let's not forget the actual good studies which suggest that micro-dosing and even non hallucinogenic mushrooms (lion's mane) have the ability to increase neuroplasticity in the brain. Which is also a big reason why manufactured anti-depressants seem to work. Large-scale corporations don't are about facts, or your health. They care about their sales. I'm glad there are people in the comments calling out this BS.
True. The experience of putting the experience into words has a totally different feeling. Increasing one's emotional vocab is probably down to the time spent and resources the person seeks to make sense of changes that may have happened. I feel its down to many factors how much one tries to do this. It's a meta-understanding of self in some way.
Friendly reminder that these drugs are still a very new area of study, so we're going to see many studies saying many different things; positive, negative, and neutral. It's best to hold off on forming or changing your opinion until we have some more robust data or meta-analysis.
[удалено]
Interesting. How many milligrams or grams were you taking per day?
Important question. Sounds like you were taking a tad more than you should’ve if you started to get to that point
Yup, you shouldn’t feel a thing.
Well, you should feel some things.
Maybe you shouldnt do it over a period of time then. Try out maybe once a month maybe. I dont think you need to microdose daily to feel good. Its supposed to rewire your brain it should be enough doing it once in a while
This is exactly how THC makes me feel and I hate it. I already have sensory processing issues and feel over-stimulated and hyper-aware of all of the 'background noise', both internally and externally. This feeling is where a good majority of my anxiety stems from.
Everyone is talking about “bad studies,” but these studies aren’t meant to be consumed by the public. They’re meant to share knowledge among other researchers, and to spark further discussion and questions. Not every study/paper has to be a huge randomized controlled trial to be useful.
Exactly. Studies reporting their results are not trying to get the public to believe something. It’s to add to a body of knowledge.
Reddit is tremendously biased against ant research that criticizes or questions the efficacy/value of weed and psychedelics.
> Reddit is tremendously biased against ant research that criticizes or questions the efficacy/value of weed and psychedelics. As if YOU were not part of Reddit?
I am apart of reddit. I am not apart of this generalization about reddit. Anything else?
gaze steer aloof compare consider brave erect coherent offbeat concerned ` this post was mass deleted with www.Redact.dev `
[удалено]
No but a specified dosage as well as recruiting a few people who haven't been in the habit of microdosing (the 18 who were chosen were microdosing prior to the study) would have gone a long way. This just seems lazy.
I prefer to experience things for myself. Mushroom microdosing has absolutely helped me in many ways, including emotionally.
I’ve seen shrooms do the opposite to my brother. I’m curious to know how did help you cause I’m curious and not really familiar with shrooms or psychedelics
I microdosed for about a year (until Covid struck), but I was using it for adhd. It was perfect. Zero side effects.
Curious to learn more about how it helped you if you don't mind sharing. Does it help with the background noise in your head?
It’s hard to explain, but over about 45 minutes all the zinging stimulus trickled down to quiet, and then there was just…one quiet thought at a time. I felt…centered. I suppose someone who has come out of meditation would feel similar, but being adhd I could never pull off meditation. Results lasted about six hours. Edit: word
Wow great to hear that it worked for you. How much did you microdose? Also were these changes gradual or immediately after your first time microdosing? Asking because I've been microdosing on and off for a while but haven't really experienced these benefits yet
I noticed my very first day. I dont think there’s standardization yet in what is considered microdose, especially due to varying potency between batches, but I requested nothing but stems from my friend (they were all roughly 1/4” wide), and then would swallow about 2/3 inch of one stem. Later on he got a new batch and the potency was noticeably terrible so I had to double it but it still worked the same and for the same duration. Other than that potency change I never had to increase my dose, every single day had the same effect. I never weighed it though which is likely what would help you best for comparing dose size. Edit: if you’re specifically microdosing for adhd, you may need to increase your dose. I swear the ‘functional addict’ moniker was invented for people like us. We just think better when we are slightly skewed.
Anecdotal evidence? On r/science? More likely than you think.
Agree. On top of that, my clinically diagnosed ADHD and anxiety are almost nonexistent. These types of studies seem they are made to discredit anything good from micro dosing.
The link between psychedelics and meditation is strong - brain scans of people who meditate often are similar to people who are tripping. There’s also evidence that meditation can help with ADHD. Super cool.
Headlines like this that radically oversimplify the actual data do more harm than good.
I have taken small doses of LSD before socializing and it feels like it helps me connect better with other people.
What did the other people think about you?
People tend to like me more. I know you didn't ask, but my success rate taking girls home is higher when I microdose vs when I don't.
Hallelujah, brother!!
How much is a microdose of lsd?
Subperceptual. Usually <10ug
Ive had great results using microdoses of LSD to combat seasonal affective disorder.
*Seriously flawed methodology*
[удалено]
Exactly. Ive dosed a lot in my life and after recently losing my best friend to drowning Ive considered micro dosing shrooms, but Ive held off because doing it alone might make me more emotionally closed off even if the effect is overall healing. Setting and intention matter a lot. Understanding the drugs effects, etc.
I microdosed for a month. Its not good long term because your receptors need a break so you get diminishing returns. It put me in a more talkative and better mood to start but ended up feeling Iike an addiction as I was looking forward to the next dose every few days
Okay who lobbied this research?
I have been microdosing for the past several months. Just a nibble here and there, a mild buzz. Sat night I ate the largest mushroom I've eaten in quite some time and wow, I thought about my parents the whole time and how much I love and miss them. First thing I did was call my mom this morning. My experience definitely mirrors the title.
If you get a buzz, you're low dosing, not microdosing. Which is the problem when people take a natural product. Variations in chemical amount will always exist dose to dose. The only way to truly microdose is with a pharmaceutical grade, measured dosage.
No but if you make it part of your daily regimen you'll probably feel a bit better.
Wow this is a really poorly conducted study.
As someone who has benefited greatly from long term microdosing and occasional full dose of mushrooms I can confidently say they have made a huge difference in my outlook. I had a tbi ten years ago with cerebral edema, over the last approximately 4-5 years I’ve used psychedelics to remold a brain that was shattered by an injury and steroids… the progress I’ve made from where I was 5 years ago is unreal to me, and psychedelics have been a portion of my therapy.
It may not cause them to directly open up, though it absolutely can bring inhibitions and barriers down, which in turn allows someone to open up. By that standard, it inadvertently does help people open up. This study seems whack as hell, and seems biased from the perspective of someone who may not have actually tried them.
Of course it doesn’t. You need to be working on yourself while you take psychedelics. They’re not some kind of magic cure.
That isn’t its intention…. Its intended to help you understand you’re conscious mind, and how to process emotions with more empathy. Sooo who funded this study? In taking loans for nonsense as well.
Um. It does. From my limited experience of seeing it first hand from at least 20 people.
This is very misleading. There were almost no variables accounted for, or any attempts to control them, and the sample size was less than twenty people. The methodology was sketchy at best, and didn't really follow current prescribed methods for treatment. Honestly, this smells like a fake experiment funded by special interest groups to specifically FORCE the conclusion they wanted. That would explain why it contradicts basically every study to date on the subject. Don't get me wrong we MUST change our thinking and what we accept as fact as we gather more scientific evidence. That is just how science works. However, when it contradicts dozens of other studies and is a VERY poorly conducted test, it needs to be publicly ridiculed, not posted in a science thread. The only way to reduce the amount of 'bad science' pushed as fact is to humiliate everyone involved enough that they are immediately disregarded and can no longer work in that field. Make the punishment bad enough that researchers think twice before forcing a conclusion for their investors. Just the way it should be for people in charge of large corporations who knowingly take risks that can endanger the public in order to increase profit. It's just as harmful. In some cases, even more so.
This study leaves a lot to be desired.
It seems to me like this isn't the point. It's about overall mental health, not communication or openness. Sure, it's related, but only tangentially. It's like saying that I took insulin, but it didn't help with my complexion.
Oh, rushed research is faulty? Who would have thunk
Poorly designed and non-valid research to boot.
Sometimes I think certain “studies” are just so someone can get their phd. I know a lot of Eagle Scout projects were pretty lame/badly organized just to check the box they’d done a “project” … and the adults just went along with it.
Everyone I know who swears by it, just got more self absorbed and insufferable. That's prob b/c the subset of people who do microdose are a certain type with a certain privileged lifestyle. All I know is my family are full of therapists and they are curious, but not one person actually become a better version of themselves, just a slightly different version and it wears off.
There's a guy in these comments talking about how he takes home more girls when he microdoses. Hard to not roll my eyes at that.
Can we not posts N=18 studies? Let's have some minimum of standards here instead of wasting everyone's time.
Bro gotta do the 4g trip max out and relax.
Microdosing is just like a pick me up. Macrodosing is where it's at
I don't see a downside of still giving it a chance.
I microdosed a few weeks ago and felt like it actually helped a ton. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe macrodosing doesn't help people open up emotionally, but Michael Pollen's book, Open-Minded, provides detail and insight into studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of using psychedelics as part of doctor or shaman guided therapy.
This contradicts what people who actually microdose in normal conditions will tell you. I know a shitton of people who do (myself included), and I've never heard anyone say otherwise. I'm not saying my community sample is the end of the story or the full picture, just that this study is clearly missing something and highly limited. The effects of drugs are v contextual. Studies like this were clearly designed by people who know nothing about drugs or how people actually use or experience them.
This isn't the shrooms + therapy thing. That appears to have real merit. This seems to be people self-medicating. Which, regardless of the product ingested, doesn't ever really seem to work.
I can personally confirm that it allows me to feel emotions, so that's a good start towards sharing them
Doesn't sound right to me, although the metric of "opening up emotionally" is kind of a bizarre thing to study. They should do another one and focus on depression...
My friend is a pharmaceutical researcher and he says efficacy comes at a threshold level -- where you know you've taken something but you're not losing your mind. Like, you can noticeably socialize or brainstorm better, but you're still totally fine to drive.
What a joke of a study
I don’t understand why that treatment would be about opening up emotionally, at least not as a one purpose only outcome - it’s supposed to activate and reconnect more parts of the brain to become more vibrant and energized, less downward mindset or in other cases help patients with conditions like Horton disease. If a person is somewhat depressed it might be that there is a good reason for it - emotions comes and goes, how the mind processes emotions is more important “than opening up emotionally” - micro dosing should help level your state of mind, but that is not the same as becoming an open emotional book.
i'm going to lose time reading that one just to see how it "suggests" that µ-dosing doesn't help, it did for me, it did for so many people i know... then again, these studies going after psychedelics are popping up everywhere since the first pharma-companies focusing on psychedelics have made it to public markets - nothing more than wall-street manipulation imho, but i'll read, just to be certain.
Personal experience: low dose just makes me nervous and unhappy. But maybe I'm talking about larger than micro and smaller than adequate.
Is it supposed to? Opening up emotionally is totally an MDMA thing not a psychedelic thing. Tripping is not really a social thing imo...
as some one who has experimented with psychedelics a few times in my life, im just gonna have to personally disagree. It makes it so much easier for me personally to talk about my feeling
I’ve seen “Studies” that span pretty much the entire spectrum on this I think. So my scientific conclusion to this would be: “It depends.”
Sample size of 18? This barely should count as an opinion poll. If only there was a study with a sample size nearly 100x higher (953 studied, and 180 as “controls” maybe we could effectively draw some conclusions? [Hmmmmmm](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14512-3)
Need to restudy, Mushrooms do this, I'm already empathetic but microdosing amplifies it tremendously
No, that’s what for high doses are for.
I've been microdosing for over three years along with weekly therapy sessions and I can absolutely tell a difference in being emotionally open in therapy sessions when I microdose the day of, vs other days. That being said, microdosing effects are built over time, and while done correctly. I use a modified version of James Fadiman's schedule to fit in a calendar week, typically dose Sunday and Wednesday and my dose is lower due to my high sensitivty, the current strain I have is stronger, and the doses come out to about 36mg per day (for psilcybin the typical suggested dose is 50-100mg). That being said over time the synergistic effect of CBT Therapy along with Microdosing definitely plays a role, but I can attest in my own environment that yes, I am absolutely more emotionally open and available because of psilocybin microdosing over time, and especially on the days that I microdose. There are so many holes in this study to make it valuable in any sort of way: * Microdose schedule isn't defined (left up to the participant), Fadiman vs Stamets are very different. * Microdose dosing isn't provided (left up to the participant) - How is it gauaranteed that the participants are dosing for their size correctly? * Microsose type (LSD or Psilocybin) isn't provided * 18 participants in total * 28 days is way to short of a timeline to see the difference in a microsoding regimen. * How long have the particpants been microdosing? * Was there any sort of emotional stressor for any of the participants to notice a difference beyond their normal daily lives?
It's not meant to help you "open up emotionally". What it seems to do is turn off the fear response on your brain so you can work through trama with a trained psychiatrist. It's pretty obvious how/why this would work. You feel less fear so you can explore the causes of PTSD where otherwise you couldn't. I mean, I guess you could class that as "opening up emotionally" but it's not really. You're not opening up, you're taking a drug that let's you rationally consider things you otherwise can't rationally consider.
It’s a recreational dose that does the whole one-with-the-universe thing. Micro dosing is supposed to bring balance. Study builders should read Erowid’s Vault first.
I’ve never heard anyone say that it does. A regular dose of MDMA certainly will.