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Elias Dakwar, a psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center who researches mind-altering substances. Others said they have experienced improvements in creativity, diet, sleep and sex. Fadiman said that hundreds of microdosers who have sent him written accounts of their experiences while on his regimen - hardly an exhaustive medical study, to be sure - have reported decreased anxiety, depression, even migraines. The levels ingested are intended to be too small to inspire Technicolor hallucinations, but large enough to enhance a sense of mental flow. The idea behind microdosing is to take regular “sub-perceptual” doses of hallucinogens (in the case of LSD, about 10 micrograms, roughly one-tenth of a standard recreational dose) once every four days. (She declined to discuss the exact timing of her microdosing foray, citing statute-of-limitations concerns.) Nevertheless, her mood swings in recent years had become so serious with the hormonal changes of premenopause that she was open to anything, Ms. The closest thing she had experienced to an acid trip was an underwhelming psilocybin half-trip during her freshman year at Wesleyan University.
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Waldman never felt drawn to recreational drugs, she said. She has published seven installments of her “Mommy-Track Mysteries” series, along with four other novels, including “Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,” which was adapted into the 2011 Natalie Portman film “The Other Woman.”Īs a hard-charging career woman, Ms. Waldman, who was born in Israel, transitioned to a writing career. After starting her career as a corporate lawyer in New York, and later working as a public defender in Southern California (she graduated from Harvard Law School in the same class as Barack Obama, in 1991), Ms. “I did this because I was afraid I was going to kill myself.” Downward Spiralįrom the outside, such an admission may seem surprising given Ms. “I didn’t do this on a lark,” she said, wearing black yoga pants and a fleece jacket over breakfast at Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain, a retro-style diner in Carroll Gardens, on a recent visit to New York. Her tempestuous psyche, she said, was tearing apart her marriage and raising thoughts of suicide. Countless prescription pharmaceuticals had failed to stabilize her chronic mood disorders, including depression and Bipolar II disorder, and, more recently, her premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a particularly disabling form of premenstrual syndrome. Waldman, however, was drawn to microdosing not so much as a career propellant, but as a last-ditch attempt to find mental equilibrium. In 2011, James Fadiman, a Bay Area psychologist who studied under Timothy Leary, published “ The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys.” Since then, microdosing has been embraced by a subculture of boundary-pushing (and law-flouting) career-minded people as something of an illicit, chemical form of yoga - an alternative health regimen intended to bring mental balance, as well as enhance productivity. Lately, however, the topic of microdosing has gained currency outside drug-enthusiast circles. Waldman may seem an unlikely proselyte for a second Age of Aquarius. Age of ‘Microdosing’Ī 52-year-old mother of four whose usual definition of “excess” is a wine spritzer, Ms. For them, LSD is less a kaleidoscopic mind expander than a humble mood enhancer, as subtle and quotidian as Prozac. Knopf next week, it’s a new psychedelic era. Waldman, who recounts her microdosing journey in a new memoir, “ A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life,” to be published by Alfred A. Waldman had discovered microdosing, an illegal but voguish drug regimen in which devotees seek to enhance creativity, focus and mental balance by ingesting regular, barely perceptible doses of hallucinogens like LSD or psilocybin mushrooms.įorget “turn on, tune in, drop out.” To recent converts like Ms.