7 ms·
As someone who has spent a few weeks microdosing, the effects of LSD are definitely not a placebo effect, BUT! Psychedelics are not fire-and-forget like SSRIs,
by Mo3 4y ago
As someone who has spent a few weeks microdosing, the effects of LSD are definitely not a placebo effect, BUT! Psychedelics are not fire-and-forget like SSRIs, Adderall, or any other substance class known to the masses. Psychedelics bring up your subconscious processes into aware consciousness, and do so to lesser extent even at microdoses. What you actually do with this and use it for, is also precisely what will define the utility and benfit (or harm) for yourself. The effects and the benefits you can get off microdosing depend on the same things on which the outcome of real full-dose trips depend: Set and setting.
Dosing acid every morning will do absolutely nil for you if you're just going to continue doing what you always did. You're going to do it with a little bit of an expanded mind, have comparably better creative and abstract thought streams, maybe get to see small glimpses of how your subconscious works during your daytime routine, and appreciate details and life itself more. You might also start interpreting too much into your experience or experience placebo effects.
Nothing of that is permanent, and nothing will change, until you actually start to use it with clear intent as a tool to accelerate forming of new habits and thought patterns for yourself, which is MUCH harder than it sounds like. What LSD is really good at is opening up the flood barriers of your subconscious mind and removing filters off your perception, which then leads to exactly the effects you can use for benefit - that every experience you make while under the influence is immediately ingrained into your neural pathways 100x stronger than usually, and your stream of thought and inner monologue is very.. "clear" and accessible, so you can also apply this effect to your own inner unconscious monologue. This is for example where trauma is continued within yourself. You might have noticed that, if you let your mind chat and run unchecked and unwatched, sometimes it will start to form thoughts and inner monologue that resembles closely how you were treated by your parents in early childhood.
Coupled with downsides of microdosing (and yes, there are downsides), it is a really delicate venture to undertake and you will need good knowledge and experience of psychedelics, psychology and a clear and direct intent, plan and motivation, or you are bound to end up just routinely microdosing for no purpose whatsoever and fuck up your brain chemistry for a while.
Would recommend to some, but definitely not as a routine activity. Max 1 week.
- simion314 4y ago>As someone who has spent a few weeks microdosing, it is definitely not a placebo effect, You can't know 100% unless someone actually swaps your stuff with a placebo, especiall with something that is so hard to measure.
- Trasmatta 4y ago> As someone who has spent a few weeks microdosing, it is definitely not a placebo effect I hear you, but "a few weeks" and N of 1 isn't enough to determine that something isn't placebo.
- Mo3 4y agoNo, obviously not, but I thought I'd just share my subjective n=1 perspective.
- ShamelessC 4y agoDon't you think that psychedelics would be particularly prone to placebo to the point that it's probably not safe to assume you weren't effected by it in some way? > Coupled with downsides of microdosing (and yes, there are downsides) Yeah - I feel like every drug user on hacker news is like the pinnacle of mental health or something because there's a whole batch of people called the mentally ill for whom I can never recommend microdosing, lest they have a panic attack or manic episode. But sure! Psychedelics are all upside! /s
- Mo3 4y ago> Don't you think that psychedelics would be particularly prone to placebo to the point that it's probably not safe to assume you weren't effected by it in some way? Sure do. The immediate effects are anything but a placebo, but there is.. gigantic room for interpretation left open regarding actual persistent long-lasting benefits. It's a little bit like the hen and egg problem with psychedelics.. if there's anything that probably always holds true to some extent, it's that you will gain more insight into yourself - whether that is helpful then again depends on what you make out of it. Intent... if you have none, you leave the room for interpretation open to delusions.