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DISCLAIMER: all advice given here is given under the assumption that you did your research, and that you have good reasons why you're interested in psychedelics

DISCLAIMER: all advice given here is given under the assumption that you did your research, and that you have good reasons why you're interested in psychedelics as a tool. They're a powerful tool, and powerful tools cut both ways. Turning into a new age woo head is a real risk, I've seen it happen to the staunchest of sceptics, no one is immune. Do your research, people, test your drugs, and be careful. I think this research sort of puts the kibosh on microdosing as a paradigm, which has been my intuition all along. If you really want the potential from psychedelics, microdosing is sort of the wrong approach I always thought. What you want to do instead is take them maybe once a year at most, though just one trip in a lifetime can be sufficient depending on your situation, then spend the following period of plasticity putting a lot of effort into changing your life the way you want to, establish habits, pick up new techniques, whatever it is you want to accomplish. You will learn faster, be more able to establish habits. And that learning is forever. You can reap the benefits for the rest of your life, completely sober. I have done extensive self experimentation with microdosing of various psychedelics and the results were fairly clear to me. I felt smarter, and overall pretty great. I felt like I was making all these brilliant connections. But whenever there was an objective source of truth available, it became clear this was all an illusion, I was struggling to make connections that would otherwise be obvious to me, and that made it feel more significant than it was. Chess, for instance, was one such source of truth. Played a couple long games against evenly matched opponent(rated and everything). Made a complete ass of myself. Played easily 3-400 elo points below my usual level. And all the while thinking I was playing brilliantly and calculating deep lines, I was really just imagining lines that never worked. My working memory was terrible. Time management completely off.

StanislavPetrov 3y ago
>Chess, for instance, was one such source of truth. Played a couple long games against evenly matched opponent(rated and everything). Made a complete ass of myself. Played easily 3-400 elo points below my usually level. And all the while thinking I was playing brilliantly and calculating deep lines, I was really just imagining lines that never worked. My working memory was terrible. Time management completely off. As a supplemental anecdote, I won my first chess tournament at Manhattan Chess club in the early 1990s while dosed on a significant amount of mushrooms. Certainly the perception of time is an issue and I'm certain the results would have been different if the game had been shorter (as most games are these days), but in a 120 + 60 it wasn't an issue.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Interesting. What kind of state of mind are we talking about here? Threshold, above threshold, etc? I've never played a tournament game on a threshold or above dose before. I did play a casual game on a very large dose(probably 50 or 75mg) of 2c-b once, but I could barely discern the board at that point, and the results were... as expected.
randomopining 3y ago
So you are convinced the real benefits lie in macro and not micro?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Yes. I should have specified that. Rare, larger doses.
  - breck 3y ago
    This is my experience as well. Life changing if done on occasion (every few years in my experience). Some of the best days of my life (warning: every time I do them I start by seeing some seriously scary monsters before my positivity takes control). Tried microdosing for a month once hoping it would make me smarter but seemed to have little effect.
pengaru 3y ago
> I felt smarter, and overall pretty great. I felt like I was making all these brilliant connections. And here I thought the whole point of micro-dosing is the dose is too small to feel anything at all. AIUI what you're calling microdosing is still in the realm of macrodosing, and no shit your working memory and time management was affected. What you were feeling were low-key hallucinations.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Sure, I tried doses that literally didn't do anything, but they literally didn't do anything. There was no magical functional in between land there. It was either nothing at all, or very slight lift in mood and significant side effects, especially as it went on for days.
- justmacro 3y ago
  Well, I guess what do you mean by feel? I've taken micro-dose amounts, 10-20ug, and have definitely realized I had taken something, but only if I really focused on it. It's certainly not the same as taking 50ug, but you can feel your body working a little differently. Maybe you have to get into amounts even smaller than that? Or maybe it's just placebo? I don't know, hard to say. I do agree with the GP though, sometimes the thing you need is to just jump into a full on 100-150ug trip and hang out in it for the day. Let yourself regain some of that open state and change up the habitual patterns you may not know you're locked into over the course of the next days and weeks. I personally end up doing it about once a year, give or take, and it always ends up being a positive experience (if sometimes difficult).
- xcv123 3y ago
  > And here I thought the whole point of micro-dosing is the dose is too small to feel anything at all. That is not the point of micro-dosing. What would be the purpose of taking it, if it does absolutely nothing at all? The idea is that you are taking a very small dose, to cause a mild effect, and not so much that you trip out and start hallucinating.
  - pengaru 3y ago

StanislavPetrov 3y ago

>Chess, for instance, was one such source of truth. Played a couple long games against evenly matched opponent(rated and everything). Made a complete ass of myself. Played easily 3-400 elo points below my usually level. And all the while thinking I was playing brilliantly and calculating deep lines, I was really just imagining lines that never worked. My working memory was terrible. Time management completely off. As a supplemental anecdote, I won my first chess tournament at Manhattan Chess club in the early 1990s while dosed on a significant amount of mushrooms. Certainly the perception of time is an issue and I'm certain the results would have been different if the game had been shorter (as most games are these days), but in a 120 + 60 it wasn't an issue.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
Interesting. What kind of state of mind are we talking about here? Threshold, above threshold, etc? I've never played a tournament game on a threshold or above dose before. I did play a casual game on a very large dose(probably 50 or 75mg) of 2c-b once, but I could barely discern the board at that point, and the results were... as expected.

randomopining 3y ago

So you are convinced the real benefits lie in macro and not micro?

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
Yes. I should have specified that. Rare, larger doses.
- breck 3y ago
  This is my experience as well. Life changing if done on occasion (every few years in my experience). Some of the best days of my life (warning: every time I do them I start by seeing some seriously scary monsters before my positivity takes control). Tried microdosing for a month once hoping it would make me smarter but seemed to have little effect.

pengaru 3y ago

> I felt smarter, and overall pretty great. I felt like I was making all these brilliant connections. And here I thought the whole point of micro-dosing is the dose is too small to feel anything at all. AIUI what you're calling microdosing is still in the realm of macrodosing, and no shit your working memory and time management was affected. What you were feeling were low-key hallucinations.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
Sure, I tried doses that literally didn't do anything, but they literally didn't do anything. There was no magical functional in between land there. It was either nothing at all, or very slight lift in mood and significant side effects, especially as it went on for days.
justmacro 3y ago
Well, I guess what do you mean by feel? I've taken micro-dose amounts, 10-20ug, and have definitely realized I had taken something, but only if I really focused on it. It's certainly not the same as taking 50ug, but you can feel your body working a little differently. Maybe you have to get into amounts even smaller than that? Or maybe it's just placebo? I don't know, hard to say. I do agree with the GP though, sometimes the thing you need is to just jump into a full on 100-150ug trip and hang out in it for the day. Let yourself regain some of that open state and change up the habitual patterns you may not know you're locked into over the course of the next days and weeks. I personally end up doing it about once a year, give or take, and it always ends up being a positive experience (if sometimes difficult).
xcv123 3y ago
> And here I thought the whole point of micro-dosing is the dose is too small to feel anything at all. That is not the point of micro-dosing. What would be the purpose of taking it, if it does absolutely nothing at all? The idea is that you are taking a very small dose, to cause a mild effect, and not so much that you trip out and start hallucinating.
- pengaru 3y ago