A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life

by Ayelet Waldman

Today, though I woke up feeling a little irritable, I managed to assert control before losing my temper with the kids or flaming anyone on the Internet. Impulse control? Me? Can this really be happening? My persistent failure to control my impulses is one of the main reasons I keep trying different therapies. I want to increase the time between psychological trigger and reaction. I need only as long as it takes to take a single breath, enough of a hesitation to activate my superego and soothe the immediate agony of id. A moment to stop and ponder the question: what is the sensible reaction to this provocation, not the most pleasurable?

Sensible

I turned to a psychopharmacologist to find out what is going on in my brain when I consume the microdose. He told me that LSD is an agonist, a stimulator, of the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor. Antidepressants also act on 5-HT receptors, including 5-HT2A, but they work by inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin, causing it to remain in synapses longer. Because serotonin is one of the neurotransmitters thought to be most closely linked with feelings of well-being and happiness, the theory behind SSRIs is that having serotonin sit around longer, with your synapses marinating in it, makes you feel better. By contrast, when a psychedelic drug stimulates 5-HT2A receptors, that leads to the stimulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which my psychopharmacologist friend described as “like Miracle-Gro for your brain. It stimulates growth, connections, and activity.” A psychiatric researcher described the neurological effects of LSD to me this way: “By activating the 5-HT2A receptor, you increase the transmission of glutamate.” Glutamate is the neurotransmitter most responsible for brain functions like cognition, learning, and memory. Though they’re talking about two different substances in the brain, the two doctors are essentially saying the same thing. BDNF and glutamate are interrelated. Psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to grow and change, by increasing the level of BDNF in the brain and by increasing glutamate activity.

Boom

In a study at the Imperial College in London,*5 researchers discovered that a single dose of LSD “produced robust psychological effects; including heightened mood but also high scores on the PSI, an index of psychosis-like symptoms. Increased optimism and trait openness were observed 2 weeks after LSD and there were no changes in delusional thinking.” They concluded that, although psychedelics like LSD produce disturbing psychosis-like symptoms during the period of intoxication, in the long term they “leave a residue of ‘loosened cognition’…that is conducive to improved psychological wellbeing.”

Let loose

Conceived by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is the state of “intense emotional involvement” and timelessness that comes from immersive and challenging activities. Flow can happen when you are creating art or computer code or when you are scaling a mountain. It’s a gift that arrives rarely, when you are most focused and present.

Flow

As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, told me, “The war on drugs and the war on crime are the most recent manifestation of an impulse to punish, control, and exploit poor people of color which will surface repeatedly in our country until we are willing to face our racial history.” Our interminable drug war has from its inception set its sights firmly on the poor and the brown. The first drug laws, the anti-opium laws of the 1870s, were directed at Chinese immigrants, never mind that the country was full of white middle-class laudanum addicts, tippling from their dropper bottles all day long. Early in the next century, support for the laws criminalizing cocaine was ginned up by claims that “drug-crazed Negroes” were destroying white society and murdering white women. Southern senators, unperturbed by their wives’ opioid addictions, believed that cocaine made black men superhuman, even that it made them immune to bullets. When the first drug czar, a man named Harry Anslinger, wanted to criminalize marijuana, he appealed to people’s biases against immigrants from Mexico, claiming that the drug made Mexicans sexually violent. William Randolph Hearst jumped on this bandwagon, warning again and again in the pages of his newspapers about the dangers of the Mexican “Marihuana-Crazed Madman.” This demonization continues today.*1 White people are five times as likely to use drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at ten times...

War on drugs

The room was dark; its windows were hidden beneath eaves. Wainscoting, stained nearly black, crawled up the walls. A heavy bookshelf ran the entire circumference of the ceiling, a leather strap keeping the books in place. Very cool. I hated it.

Bipolar

I happily turned Dr. Schaeffer’s dreary consulting room over to the assistant, and wandered with my laptop out to cafés, to work surrounded by people and pastry—an ideal environment, I insisted, for an extrovert with an addiction to sugar.

I feel seen

We talk about which drugs have a high potential for abuse and injury, and how to avoid those perils, and we also talk about which drugs are relatively safer. We try to be very clear about the risks and rewards of drug use. All of this frank talk inevitably invites questions about our own drug use. My husband and I have always operated on the principle that, though we don’t owe our children an answer to every one of their questions, when we do choose to say something, we owe them the truth. If the kids ask us if we’ve done a certain drug and we don’t feel that they’re old enough to understand the answer or even if we just prefer not to say, we’ll tell them that. Otherwise, we grit our teeth and fess up. We never lie.

Never lie

Most people are familiar with Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s “Contract for Life,” in which the child agrees not to drive drunk but to call for a ride, and the parent agrees to provide the ride without judgment or consequence. This is a classic harm-reduction model. None of us wants our children to abuse alcohol or drugs, but even less do we want them to fear our wrath so much that they take a ride that ends up killing them. Studies show that the flexibility in thinking that allows your teens to learn is what also causes them to be more likely to engage in an unknown risk (drunk driving, possibly dying) than a known risk (being yelled at by Mom). It’s as though the very thing that makes them smarter must first make them stupid. My husband and I feel that the best way to combat this stupidity is with information.

Harm reduction

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” Bullshit. When I gaze at my husband, when I feel his body along the length of mine, I feel a deep, contented joy, a warmth that begins in my belly, spreads out to my limbs and through the top of my skull. If that’s not love, what is?

Love

equanimity.

Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry and an expert on manic-depressive illness, who is a fellow traveler. Her memoir An Unquiet Mind provided me with the comfort of shared experience, but it was her book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament that I loved.

“to awaken in ourselves and the many people who come here the bodhisattva spirit, the spirit of kindness and realistic helpfulness.”

Bodhi

Interestingly, research shows that walking in nature, especially among tall trees, reduces anxiety and depression as effectively as SSRIs (Rachel Hine, Carly Wood, and Jo Barton, Ecominds: Effects on Mental Wellbeing, an Evaluation for Mind [London: Mind, 2013]). The Japanese even have a name for this: shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Their Ministry of Health encourages it as a stress reliever;

Tall trees

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,

Before the Shulgins first came to lecture to my class, the only thing I’d heard about MDMA was that it depleted spinal fluid (this turned out to be a legend of the drug war, with no basis in fact) and transformed users into sex fiends. (Another myth. Though it greatly heightens the senses, the drug actually impedes orgasm and, in men, the ability to sustain an erection.) Sasha and Ann referred to MDMA as an empathogen or entactogen, a drug that enhances feelings of emotional communion and empathy, allowing for an opening up of communication. This, they said, was what made it ideal for couples. It allowed them to discuss potentially painful or divisive issues without triggering feelings of fear and threat, but of love. A love drug!

Love

Though MDMA in its pure form is not particularly dangerous, even at high doses, there have been fatalities, including among healthy young adults.*2 MDMA raises body temperature and inhibits natural thermoregulation, increasing the risk of heatstroke. For this reason, probably the worst thing to do under the influence of MDMA is dance wildly in a packed room or beneath the desert sun. MDMA can also increase heart rate and raise blood pressure, making it dangerous for those who suffer from high blood pressure or heart disease. Additionally, MDMA can cause water retention. So, for example, if one takes it at a rave, and then chugs water to counteract the possibility of dehydration, one can suffer from hyponatremia, or water toxicity. Furthermore, MDMA certainly affects the brain. We know this because tolerance develops with repeated use, and can eventually become chronic. Heavy users don’t experience the positive effects of the drug, no matter how many pills they “stack,” or how much they ingest. Though there is no clear answer yet as to why this is so, it seems likely that some neuroadaptive process is going on. This means, in laymen’s terms, that MDMA changes your brain chemistry in some way, though we do not know whether these changes are destructive or problematic.

MDMA

MDMA certainly enhances the senses. It makes touch feel glorious. The drug first came on with what I can best describe as a wave of warm, sensual tingling. I even got wet. But neither of us experienced the profound sexual arousal we’d anticipated. In fact, nothing about the experience was what we had imagined it would be. We didn’t rock the bed like a wrecking ball. We didn’t trance-dance into a fatally overheated stupor. We didn’t see fairies dancing in the sky, or any other visual hallucinations. The drug is not, as I said, hallucinogenic. What we did was talk. For six hours, we talked about our feelings for each other, why we love each other, how we love each other. We talked about what we felt when we first met, how our emotional connection grew and deepened, how we might deepen it still. The best way I can describe it is that we were transported emotionally back to our relationship’s early and most exciting days, to the period of our most intense infatuation, but with all the compassion and depth of familiarity of a decade of companionship. We saw each other clearly, loved each other profoundly, and basked in this reciprocated love.

MDMA talk

My sense of dissatisfaction continued until I went to therapy. Sometimes I think I pay this professional for the privilege of having a ready ear for my complaints, in order to spare my friends and family from having to listen to them. Today my topic was how my lousy workday awoke feelings of insecurity and dissatisfaction, which inevitably led to concerns about the possibility of my depression’s return.

Therapy

Given the myriad injustices of mass criminalization and mass incarceration, and given the astonishing financial rewards that have accrued to violent criminal syndicates by our current policy, it’s time to consider a change. In May 2014, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a conservative who is the most-cited legal scholar of the last century, published a book review in the New Republic in which he argued for the decriminalization not only of marijuana, but of all drugs, including LSD. Posner argued that decriminalization would alleviate the deplorable conditions in prisons caused by overcrowding: The sale and possession of marijuana are en route to being decriminalized; and I am inclined to think that cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, LSD, and the rest of the illegal drugs should be decriminalized as well—though not deregulated. They should be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration for safety, like other drugs, and they should be taxed heavily, like alcohol and cigarettes. Alcohol and cigarettes are “recreational” drugs, too—and quite possibly more destructive of the users than the illegal drugs are, and, in the case of alcohol, also of acquaintances, family members, drivers, and pedestrians. The revenue from a sales tax on marijuana alone would pay for a substantial chunk of the cost of our prison system.

Decriminalize

“How would that work?” I asked. “Would I be able to just go online and buy LSD?” “Yes,” he said. An adult would be able to go online and order a small dose of a psychedelic or of MDMA. She would be assured that what she received was in fact pure and unadulterated. In addition, she would receive warnings about potential dangers, and clear information about safe dosages relative to body mass, age, and experience. Such a system would have a substantial impact on individual and public health outcomes, because the harms associated with MDMA, and to a lesser extent psychedelics, are generally a function of dose and adulteration. As Dr. Hart says, “Focus on purity, focus on unit dose, focus on education.” If classic psychedelics and MDMA were available in a well-regulated and safety-tested manner, people would be far less likely to turn to new psychoactive substances, sometimes referred to as NPSs or alphabetamines,*7 synthetics with which all sorts of harms have been associated, including death.*8 Franklin suggested that in an ideal system there would be a role for psychedelic guides, perhaps centers where one could go to take psychedelics, offering a setting that maximized the potential for positive experiences and minimized the potential for harm. Kind of like a day spa, for tripping.

Order online

I don’t know where my father’s pain comes from, but I wish it could dissipate like Laszlo’s did. However, my father isn’t about to trek off to Peru and puke in a bucket in a shaman’s hut. He’s not even going to experiment with microdoses of LSD. That’s just not who he is. It’s a truism to say we can’t change anyone, not even the ones we love. You can find that sentiment on a thousand coffee mugs and inspirational Facebook photos. Just as I can’t force my father to drop a tab of acid, neither can I force him to confide in me. I cannot plumb the depths of his soul by listening to his psychotherapy tapes or plying him with questions. I cannot demand that he express love in a way that’s meaningful to me. Though the desire to do so might be understandable, it isn’t fair. In my relationship with my father I am always grasping, always needing. But aching for the ideal gets in the way of the actual. I have resented my father because he wasn’t affectionate like Shimon, empathetic like Fadiman, willing to take risks for the sake of self-knowledge like Laszlo. What’s the point of all this resentment? What good has it done me? It certainly hasn’t made either me or my dad any more content. There is a mutually satisfying relationship to be had with my father; just not the one I have been craving for so long. Got any pressing questions about the Gulag? Curious about the casualty rate at the Battle of Shiloh? Let me know; I’ll ask my dad.

My father's pain