This is commonly known as the placebo effect. People often feel better or worse even when taking totally inert substances, like sugar pills. It is possible that microdosing psychedelics was unrelated to many of the benefits and challenges participants reported. Participants also mentioned other concerns, such as not knowing whether there could be harmful interactions between psychedelics and other medications, and lack of research evidence about the long-term effects of microdosing. Anxiety refers here to improvements in anxiety-related experiences, not to increased experience of anxiety. Participants also reported improved mood and reduced substance use on a pre-defined measure. Research should examine these possible side effects and consider how they compare to the profiles of the many legal substances available, such as anti-depressants, which also cause side effects. Next up was physiological discomfort: in 18 per cent of reports, participants described headaches, gastrointestinal issues, insomnia and other unwanted side-effects of microdosing. As research on psychedelics grows, these substances may eventually be decriminalized or legalized, which could dispel the most common challenge reported in our sample. This challenge is not due to microdosing itself so much as social policy and norms. (Microdosers should always test their dose: you never know what you get when you’re buying unregulated substances.) In our coding of responses, illegality involved having to deal with the black market, social stigma around using illegal substances and difficulty with dose accuracy and purity. The most common challenge was illegality and this was mentioned in almost a third of reports.
Headaches, gastrointestinal issues, insomnia These data indicate perceived outcomes and do not indicate confirmed effects. In contrast, only 4.2 per cent of people mentioned reduced anxiety and several people reported increased anxiety, so studying microdosing for anxiety reduction seems less promising. Perhaps less intuitive is that many people reported microdosing made them more confident, motivated and productive, so this also seems worth researching. Differences, regardless of magnitude, should be thought of as preliminary.įor example, the most commonly reported benefit was improved mood (26.6 per cent of people) making mood the highest-potential area for future research to focus on. Positive values indicate greater endorsement of benefits negative values reflect greater endorsement of challenges. Difference in raw count of reported benefits and challenges.
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