When Ki microdosed mushrooms for the first time four years ago, everything felt lighter and less stressful. She felt reassured.
“Like a muscle relaxant,” she said. “Things are just more pleasant. You don’t harp on things quite the same.”
Alongside traditional treatments for depression and anxiety, Ki turned to taking psychedelics at a low dose — otherwise known as microdosing — to help work through trauma. She said her friends and online forums recommended trying mushrooms.
“When I first went [to a dispensary], you fill out a form why you’re using it and I circled depression, anxiety and PTSD,” she said.
Despite the growing popularity of mushroom stores, most use and possession of psychedelics is illegal in Canada.
For confidentiality reasons, Ki’s full name is shortened in this article.
Ki is part of a rising number of people microdosing psychedelics in pursuit of mental health benefits. According to a U.S. study, in 2024 there was a 1,250 per cent increase in internet search history on microdosing, compared to 2015.
Yet, the science on microdosing hasn’t caught up with its popularity.
Omer Syed, a research assistant at the Canadian Centre for Psychedelic Science, said there is little to no scientific evidence that microdosing psychedelics, like mushrooms or LSD, has any effect.
Currently, most scientific research is based on surveys, which Syed notes are subjective because people can self report outcomes. Surveys report overwhelmingly positive findings on microdosing, but few clinical trials have been conducted.
When double-blind clinical trials are conducted, where neither the patient or researchers know which substance patients are receiving to reduce bias, there’s a lack of evidence that microdosing affects creativity, concentration or mental health.
“A lot of people use microdosing for depression or anxiety or any clinical condition, but there’s not a lot of clinical trials in that area,” Syed said. “The most high value data is coming from double-blind clinical trials and these studies are lacking.”
Searching for consensus
The first challenge in microdose studies is that researchers haven’t agreed upon what amount officially constitutes a microdose.
To Syed, “a microdose is about 10 per cent of a regular dose, but different people might have different definitions of what a microdose is.”
He said in one study, a researcher might use 10 micrograms of LSD as a microdose, while another researcher might use as much as 30 micrograms.
One thing most researchers agree on is that a microdose shouldn’t cause any impairment, while a regular dose of psychedelics does cause impairment and hallucinations.
“[With microdosing,] you don’t feel any of these hallucinogenic effects, so you’re not impaired. You could probably go driving, you could engage in whatever activity you’re doing and you could work,” Syed said. “You reap the benefits of these substances at a neurological level, but you’re not impaired.”
Ki can attest to these effects. When microdosing, she said she feels like a better version of herself and more in tune with her body, emotions and creativity.
As someone who enjoys art and creativity, Ki said microdosing relaxes her and makes it easier for her to paint, bead and journal.
However, Charles Nichols, an associate professor of pharmacology at Louisiana State University, challenges the assumption that microdosing psychedelics improves creativity.
He said there is little evidence to prove microdosing improves creative ability and that the brain pretends there is an improved effect.
“If people tell them that microdosing is going to have this effect, they take it and then they sort of manifest those effects,” Nichols said.
Syed said people having preconceived positive expectations is a major challenge when conducting research.
“Generally, when you think you’ll do better, even if there’s nothing else there, you will perform better,” he said.
What Nichols and Syed are describing is the placebo effect: when someone takes a substance with no confirmed therapeutic benefits, yet reports experiencing effects.
The placebo effect can skew results and poses challenges in researching microdosing. With the placebo effect, one group is given a psychedelic and the other is given a sugar pill with no effects. Yet, both groups often report improvements in creativity, concentration and mood.
For this reason, researchers like Syed are calling for more placebo-controlled clinical trials to verify if microdosing works, as well as to investigate potential risks and opportunities for long-term use.
“Placebo effect consensus is very mixed,” Syed said. “You’d expect the people on a microdose would perform better on cognitive tasks, and people who aren’t on anything wouldn’t improve or do better. But again, it’s been conflicting results.”
Nichols, who studied the cognitive effects of microdosing LSD for concentration, said there is no known link between increased concentration and microdosing psychedelics.
“Not only was there nothing that was different between the control group and the drug-treated group, it was hard to tell which results were from the drug group or the control group,” Nichols said.
Ki said she is more susceptible to the placebo effect now because she has expectations that the mushrooms will help.
“I go into [microdosing] with a good, positive mindset, and that affects my mental state, and then that affects the experience,” Ki said.
Syed said when microdosing is combined with setting intentions such as journaling beforehand, the placebo effect can be heightened. Reflecting on, or anticipating, an experience can make you think it’s more profound than it was.
Ki sets intentions by journalling when she microdoses and said it helps her work through traumatic experiences.
“The day after, I feel like I get clarity on certain things, or I don’t feel like I’m carrying as much weight as I was before,” she said.
Potential health risks
While the placebo effect of microdosing has been well-documented, the long-term risks of the practice remain unclear.
Some researchers are worried about potential health risks of microdosing, namely that they might pose similar risks to using psychedelics in large doses.
“Some studies say there’s a risk of cardiotoxicity,” Syed said. “Increased or prolonged use of MDMA, chronic use, very frequent use, can cause cardiotoxicity — it causes heart conditions.”
This hasn’t been studied in microdosing yet, but Syed said long-term microdosing may increase the risk of cardiotoxicity.
Another risk Syed noted is hallucinogen perception persisting disorder, or HPPD, which is when you experience lasting hallucinations long after psychedelic use.
“It’s basically, you take a substance, and even after the drug has subsided, you still for days or weeks afterwards, have flashbacks to that event,” he said. “Your perception is altered temporarily, but people report it happening up to a month after.”
Syed analyzed data collected from the Global Psychedelic Survey in 2023, comparing microdosers to people who take large doses. According to the research currently in the process of being published, Syed said both groups reported HPPD-like symptoms, with large-dose participants reporting slightly higher.
“People that both [frequently] microdose and use large doses had the highest reporting of the symptom occurring,” Syed said. “Microdosing adds on to the effect of a large dose that they might have taken a long time ago, but consistently, microdoses elevated that risk.”
Microdosing for mental health
Despite the shadow of unproven side effects, researchers still have hope that microdosing might improve health by treating the brain.
Nichols said microdosing can potentially treat neural inflammation, which is often believed to contribute to people developing mental disorders such as schizophrenia and depression.
Neural inflammation occurs when immune cells in the brain produce too much cytokines, a molecule that causes inflammation in the brain, rendering it less efficient.
Nichols is studying the potential for microdosing to improve blood flow to the brain and its therapeutic possibilities for people suffering from neural inflammation.
“If there is some neural inflammation, in low doses of something like psilocybin, it could … reverse that, [leading] to a better function of neural circuits,” he said.
Mikael Palner, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Southern Denmark, said he intends to study microdosing’s soothing effects on people with ADHD, OCD and anxiety.
Palner said he believes microdosing research should primarily be targeted toward helping people with mental illness.
However, to study treatments, such as microdosing as a soother for neural inflammation, researchers need a license from national health regulators, such as the FDA or Health Canada. These licenses, however, are difficult to obtain, Palner said.
“In order to treat somebody we need to go through all the medical steps: You need to have it approved, you need to go through […] clinical trials, prove its efficacy, stuff like that,” Palner said.
‘Naturalistic’ studies
Nichols said microdosing studies also struggle to secure resources from health-funding agencies.
In response, researchers like Nichols turn to inexpensive and less rigorous “naturalistic” studies where they study people in their personal environment, rather than in a lab.
Nichols said these studies are often unreliable because “there’s no real control aim” and it can be hard to track the dosage a person is taking when placed in their natural environment.
He said the lack of quality studies on the health impacts of microdosing contributes to the limited results and the inability of scientists to acquire funding.
Syed said the evidence for microdosing is “very poor” right now and there needs to be more placebo-controlled clinical trials.
Currently, an increasing number of researchers are studying the effects of “macrodosing,” meaning the consumption of large doses of psychedelics, because of its likelihood to have an observable effect, Palner said.
Nichols said more results are produced from macrodosing studies, so more studies get funded, which inhibits microdosing research.
Clinically proven or not, Ki remains optimistic about microdosing research and its potential mental health benefits. She said she isn’t worried about the lack of scientific consensus because microdosing is working for her.
She said the right type of research hasn’t been conducted yet and researchers need to consult people who have depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder to see its effects.
“I don’t really care about the scientific surroundings, because I know what my body feels like, I know what my mental state is like, and I know what it feels like when things are different and more manageable,” she said.
Featured graphic by Alisha Velji/the Charlatan.
