Microdosing For Sports Performance, Microdosing Stacks With Psychedelics & Plant Medicines, The Best Microdosing Protocols & Much More With Jim Fadiman.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Microdosing allows you to make the life that you have currently leading healthier and in a sense smoother. But a great many people after they've done 10 cycles of microdosing and this is for very serious issues as well, like chronic depression, they take it less often. Let's assume they only give you a very small incremental improvements. But in a lot of sports time sports and weight sports, that's all you.

Need help, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

All right, you guys got an OG of the psychedelics and plant medicine industry on the show today. This is going to be a fun one. Jim, folks, Fadiman, the great Jim Fadiman. He is absolutely brilliant. You ever thought about microdosing with lsd, psilocybin, huachuma, you name it, this guy knows it all. Well folks, I get plenty of questions about this so called increasingly common phenomenon in practice of microdosing, specifically microdosing with things like psychedelics or plant medicines. We're talking everything from, you know, lithium to psilocybin to LSD to San Pedro dmt, ibogaine and beyond. And I get so many questions about this and I've never really done a full on podcast just purely devoted to microdosing that I wanted to get one of the world's leading experts on really not just microdosing but also psychedelics and plant medicine in general on the show. You might be familiar with his name. He holds degrees from Harvard and Stanford. He wrote his entire dissertation about LSD assisted psychotherapy. He's taught in psychology and design engineering at San Francisco State and Brandeis and Stanford for three decades. He's published multiple textbooks, many books which you can find all on Amazon, including two relatively recent titles, the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide and also youo Symphony of Selves, both of which I read and are excellent. His name, if you hadn't guessed yet, is, is Jim Fadiman. Jim holds a PhD and has a host of information on microdosing psychedelics in both his books and also on a relatively helpful website that I believe it was an email from Jim in which I became aware of this website at microdosingpsychedelics.com, which in and of itself has some pretty good information in it. And so everything, everything that Jim and I discussed today you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Jim Fadiman that's BenGreenful Fitness.com Jim Fadiman F a D I M A N is how you spell his last name. Jim. Welcome to the show, man.

It's nice to be here. You just introduced, I recognize him.

Yeah, he sounds like an interesting fella. And I guess the million dollar question we should start this episode off with is, do you microdose to prepare for a podcast? And if so, do you have a particular protocol you like besides perhaps a cup of coffee?

Well, actually I don't microdose for a podcast and I probably microdose a lot less than the people that I talk to, but I do get people telling me how they microdose from around the world in situations I can't imagine being in. So I know a lot more than my own experience.

All right, well, fair, fair enough. I, I, well I'm, I'm three days into a five day juice fast that my wife and I are doing, so I'm, I'm being a little bit careful mixing that with, with many other substances. But I, I, I do actually, occasionally, I even said this on podcasts before, Will occasionally microdose with, for example, like a small amount of psilocybin with lion's mane or a little bit of lsd, and have found both of those to actually be something that over the years have helped me tremendously in writing and in focus and particularly in kind of this elegant blend of creativity and productivity. If you want to call anything that I do elegant. But I'm curious, for people who may not be familiar with this at all, how would you actually define microdosing?

Well, a microdose is, as it sounds, a very small dose, in this case of a psychedelic, and it's between like a tenth or a twentieth of what would be called recreational dose. And just for people in your audience that know the numbers, if we were talking LSD, it would be about 10 micrograms. And if we were talking mushrooms, it would be a tenth of a gram to maybe 4, 10 of a gram of mushrooms. So it's a small amount and it's taken not very often.

Now, does that vary a little bit from person to person? And the reason I ask is I've talked to some people and there was even a recent research study on this on LSD particularly, where it seemed to create in many people at almost like a dose response effect, even better effects, you know, closer to say 20 micrograms, while that amount in others seemed to cause or induce a bit more anxiety. I mean, how, how wide is the variation in terms of things like, you know, body weight or metabolism or Muscle mass or things like that.

Well, the wonderful thing is the variable that you actually use, which makes sense is how does it feel? Which is kind of irrelevant to your muscle mass, et cetera. And when I say 10 micrograms, that's what we started with suggesting as a realistic dose. And what we've learned from a couple of thousands people who've reported back is that most people stay with 10, maybe 20%, say, you know, that's a little high, I'm going to go for eight or seven, and maybe one or two out of 100 will go as high as 15. What 20 gives you is just the feeling that you might just be maybe a little high. And that's an indicator in microdose world of too much. Right. Because it does. You're then starting to lose that tight focus and get more into, oh my God, look at that doorknob. Yeah, I have really not ever noticed that beautiful doorknob before.

Yeah. And I've actually found, because I discovered this with caffeine, there's a substance called L theanine that occasionally, if I've accidentally over caffeinated myself about 100-200mg of L theanine seems to take the edge off. And particularly when microdosing with the two substances we've just mentioned, psilocybin and LSD, I've found that a small dose of L theanine, 100 to 200 milligrams of L theanine, seems to actually help in that type of scenario. The only other thing I've found to have a similar effect to be magnesium threonate, which would be a form of magnesium that seems to calm the brain a little bit.

Yeah, no, there are a lot of things which kind of cool and clarify and a lot of what people take microdosing for are basically issues with consciousness and mind and mental considerations like depression. But as we'll get into it, microdosing seems to have, not surprisingly, effects on the body. You know, there's this kind of fantasy in the research world that you take something like LSD in a research lab and it goes to your brain. Well, obviously it goes to every cell in your body, like anything else in the bloodstream. So there's a lot of other effects that are not really being looked at in the high dose studies, partly because they're not interested and partly because many of these effects only show up when you're microdosing periodically.

Well, that's actually something I wanted to ask you about, and I was going to ask you about it later. But heck, I might as well right now since, since you brought it up, you know, I've found that it certainly does improve cognition and you know, a lot of kind of like creativity and productive simultaneous thinking patterns, as I mentioned earlier. But I've also noticed that it is an amazing pre workout strategy. You know, particularly I found that with LSD and psilocybin. We'll certainly talk about some others. But do you know what's going on there in terms of the exercise or the sporting effect?

Well, let's go and say what the effects are because I'm more of an observationalist than I make up theories because I've learned that making up theories is a lot easier than seeing what's going on. What's going on is it looks like in general when you microdose, your system works better. Very vague, very general. But your system includes your body and your mind. So if your body is just a little bit more in equilibrium, it will be able to do a little bit more. And the way I've described it very simply is you notice at the gym that you're doing one more set of reps. That's the kind of small size. I have a wonderful guy in who is a half marathoner. And what he started to do was noticing with it on days that he microdosed and he would be running maybe 5, 10 miles a day just as pleasure, that his times were better. And so he did a half marathon and he was watching and I got this lovely note that said, oh my God, I've taken 20 minutes off my best time that I've had in 10 years. So he was basically able to run 20 minutes faster and a half marathon, which is a big number.

Yeah, yeah, I mean that's significant. That would be considered almost like, like an illegal sports ergogenic aid enhancement difference. And I assume that pretty much all of these substances would be banned by WADA, USADA, the NCAA, etc. Am I correct?

No, none of them are banned at all.

Are you kidding me? That's very interesting. Well, I mean, I guess they're, I guess they're, they're federally not legal to use. So I suppose that in a way would, would make them problematic for an athlete. And in the same way they could get busted for doping, they could wind up on the front page of the local newspaper for having broken the law. But that surprises me that, that they're not looking at these things on light like a P test on an athlete, for example.

Well, one of the problems they would have is The P test we're talking about. Let's say you've taken 10 millionths of a gram of LSD and you're tested five hours later. One is there's very little LSD probably left in your system in the first place. And secondly, currently there aren't any tests in the sports world that look for it. Right.

And you're right. I think a lot of people don't understand what a microgram is. I mean, give people an understanding of that compared to, say, what they.

Well, imagine that you take a pin and you put on the tip of the pin, the sharp end, a dot of something. Think of sugar, it might hold a grain. That's way more than 10 micrograms.

That's a lot.

Now, I'll give you the other side of it because we don't think in terms of the real numbers of the world, because I asked one of my favorite analytic chemists how many molecules are in one millionth of a gram? Okay? Now this number makes no sense. So get ready. 1.54 quadrillion molecules. Wow. In a millionth of a gram.

You know, I have, for example, microdosed with LSA. And, and when I do that, I take about 10 micrograms, and that involves taking one tiny, tiny capsule that I dissolve into 10 ounces of water and then I drink 1 ounce of that water on a microdosing day in order to get 10. But that you got to consider. The entire capsule is dissolved in 10 ounces of water.

Yeah, so we're. So we're talking very little bits. And one of the problems that the sports world is going to start to deal with is what do you do when these substances are available? They're widely known and professional athletes are already using them. Now, let's assume they only give you a very small incremental improvement, say 3 or 4%. But in a lot of sports time sports and weight sports, that's all you need.

Yeah, absolutely. And then of course, there's the training effect as well. You know, it's like creatine, for example, can allow you to eke out an extra one to two reps of a heavy weight in the gym, thus theoretically allowing you to build strength faster than a counterpart who might not be taking creatine. What I've found with a microdose of a psychedelic substance is that whereas for me, it doesn't result in remarkably heavier weights or faster times, it reduces the rating of perceived exertion. So I can push myself harder and I feel less pain. Very similar to. And I'VE done a whole podcast on this about how ultramarathoners and ultra endurance athletes will often use a ratio, typically anywhere from a 5 to 1 to a 2 to 1 ratio of CBD to THC, to kind of put them into a flow state during those longer forms of exercise, and also to act as almost like a mild painkiller. It seems that increased or that reduced rating of perceived exertion, or rpe, as it's called in sports science literature, is something that I've noticed most profoundly that's.

Quite similar to what people report with a microdose of a psychedelic. And of course, the THC CBD is illegal also in all kinds of places. But what we're looking at is when you work with psychedelics, obviously you're looking at what happens when people say, I don't think the government's regulations are sensible because I'm dealing with something safe and beneficial. Similarly, in the sports world, where do you draw the line between a food which we know improves your metabolism and a substance which improves your metabolism that is a natural substance? A natural. A wild plant.

Yeah.

And fortunately, not my problem.

Well, you know, it's interesting because, you know, the FDA says you can safely consume about 400 milligrams or so of caffeine per day. And there can be some problematic, especially in people with heart issues. Once you get up to 1000mg, it can be highly problematic. You get up to about 10,000, which, shockingly, is a very small amount of what you could consume from a bag that you purchased for pennies on the dollar on Amazon. Bulk caffeine powder, enough to kill someone. And yet this is a substance that, at least since 2014, has not even been given a second glance by, say, the World Anti Doping association, although I do believe they have listed cannabis.

Well, fortunately, the World Doping association has enough problems. And most of my work, fortunately, is with alleviating suffering and improving capacity. Those are two kind of separate areas in which microdosing is most popular. And what I know is that science eventually catches up with what everyone's doing and sports does as well.

Yeah, well, we'll see. It'll be interesting to keep an eye on what happens as it becomes increasingly popular. But we may have gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves, because when I asked you how you would define a microdose, you brought up LSD and psilocybin as two examples. I'm curious, what other substances are people microdosing with these days and finding similar success with, in terms of the cognitive Enhancement or some of the other effects one might be looking for from a microdose.

There's a lot of other substances, for example, which turn into LSD in the body. Ald, I think 52.1p LSD. There's a number of quote, research chemicals which basically are LSD for people who live in countries other than the US where they can order them. There's of course mescaline and the cactuses that it comes in, peyote and San Pedro. There are a lot of other substances. And I hesitate as you notice a little break in my voice because I'd say of the couple of thousand reports I have, about 95% are either LSD or psilocybin. So there are other substances and basically one would say, well, are they equivalents to LSD and psilocybin? Now, I'm not talking about mdma. That's not a psychedelic, has other uses. And it's a different drug, entirely different family, different effects. People are also microdosing with ibogaine, usually after they have had a serious ibogaine session, often to help them rid of addiction. And I spoke to someone about that a couple of years ago and I said, why are you still. Why are you taking ibogaine in tiny doses? And she said, I want to keep in touch with a plant. Now that's a very different kind of reasoning. So that when you're dealing with plants, there's an extra level of whatever the essential nature of that plant is. One of the things about LSD is it doesn't have any other agenda. It's simply something that the brain and body uses. Once you get into psilocybin and peyote and ibogaine and ayahuasca, complicated. They all seem to have not only an agenda but kind of an identity. You'll hear everywhere people talking about Mama ayahuasca or grandmother peyote. Nobody ever says great uncle lsd. It has no identity outside of its effects.

It does seem as though some of these others in a way can, can almost intelligently based on this concept, probably of the sacred intelligence of plants. And perhaps because LSD is more of a synthetic, although I suppose derived to a certain extent from ergo, which would be a natural fungal extract. Yeah, I've noted that particularly for things like. Well, especially for if you're going to actually journey and take a trip dose. But even at smaller doses you do seem to see a little bit more of a guiding effect if you are meditating in terms of bringing you into insight or into states of awareness. That are a little bit different than what you would experience with lsd. I've certainly experienced that, particularly with microdoses of psilocybin and microdoses of wachuma, which would be similar to that mescaline cactus extract that you talked about. Almost as though the plant is guiding you to a certain extent, even when it's not a large dose. And in fact, those are really the three that I have the most experience with. For microdosing, I've found some type of lysergamide to be quite effective for focus and for kind of getting through a highly productive day, small amounts of psilocybin to be more effective for creativity, writing, art, music, et cetera. And then wachuma, interestingly, for like social excursions or date nights or cocktail parties or times when I would want to be a little bit more sociable. So I've found, I found different effects with many of them. Ibogaine is also interesting because that's one that I think perhaps Chris Bell has made popular with his recent documentary that he did on ibogaine for addiction. And although that's quite a hefty and serious protocol to do a. What would you call it, how would you name it? A trip, a heroic, a journey dose. What's the vernacular you use?

Imagine I've described, I would, to someone that says imagine you get the opportunity not to review every terrible thing you've done in your life, but to relive them totally vividly. And then at the end of that, you're basically given a choice. You want to do more of this or stop. And a lot of people who have stopped being addicted after ibogaine, they don't say it was. They don't say, oh boy, that was terrific, let's go drop some aibo, right, Nobody. So there's no recreational uses of some substances because that isn't the way they work.

Yeah, I can tell you that upon discovering that ibogaine is kind of used to whip some of these Central African tribes, for example, into a frenzy using iboga root, Bart, almost into this berserker like frenzy that someone might use for war or battle or hunting. I did order some of the South African bush extract and took a small dose, I think it was about 50 to 100 milligrams or so, and experimented with it pre workout and had kind of a similar effect as some of these other medicines in terms of like a pre workout boost, reduced rating of perceived exertion, enhanced exercise performance, et cetera. And so it turns out that that could technically be used for microdosing, although that's one you want to be super careful with, particularly due to it's doing.

It the hard way. But yes, you can do it.

There's a lot of cardiac complications with that one.

I once gave a little survey to a bunch of students, undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz, and one of the things I asked of, you know, what psychedelics have you used? And people said, I've used lsd, I've used peyote. And then there was this one young man who had 24 substances and I looked at that little paper and I thought, this person gets almost nothing out of his experiences. He's just collecting. Kind of like boy. Some boy scouts collect merit badges or, you know, people collect, you know, hotel stickers. So one thing I want to get clear is one of the best ways to define microdosing is they have no classic high dose psychedelic effects. No visions, no becoming one with all life, no discovering that you are a direct descendant of somebody who died in a horrible way, no anaconda snakes eating you alive. None of that. Microdosing allows you to make the life that you have currently leading healthier and in a sense, smoother. You know, when you use the term flow, one of the uses of creatives who use microdoses is they say, I'm not necessarily creating at a higher level, but I can stay in flow longer, my focus is better, I'm capable of using whatever I normally have at a higher, higher kind of percentage of valuable. I talked to a lot of journalists and said to them, by the way, you should know that it's particularly good for first drafts. And I've gotten a number of letters which said, you know that article I just wrote about our interview? You were right.

Yeah. And I think that sometime times I have a couple of thoughts on what you were just talking about. I think there are some bloggers, podcasters, even people like myself who are not necessarily, for example, using a host of different substances now and again to necessarily have a brag sheet of things we've tried, but rather as almost a form of immersive journalism to then tell people what certain effects have. And, and I think that's something that I've done some writing about, just trying certain things out, collecting certain things, and then coming back to the world and reporting on what the effects are. Very similar to what you might find on one of these psychonaut websites.

You are an investigative journalist of the human body, and one of the great gifts you've given to the people who listen to you is you've said a number of things I've tried this don't. So that's really a great gift. I admit most of my work has been finding out things where people have said, hey, it's working in this area that nobody would have noticed. And that of course is a different kind of discovery. Also now and then we find people who've taken microdoses and have an experience they didn't like. And that's also very important. This is not a panacea. This is simply something which seems to have helped a lot of different people in a lot of different places. I have reports from 51 countries for a lot of different aspects of their physiology or their mental health.

Yeah, I want to ask you about that. A few of the other reasons people might microdose. But you know, you mentioned that one of the effects is, or one of the definitions I suppose of a microdose is that you're not getting the same type of psychedelic like effect you would from a larger dose. Although, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's still stimulating that receptor I've talked about in previous podcasts, the 5H2A receptor. So it's targeting the same receptor. And when that happens, just so people know to step back here real briefly, you get the production of brain derived neurotrophic factor which is the miracle grow for your brain that stimulates growth and connections and activity and neuroplasticity along with, and this is something a lot of people aren't aware of, the production of glutamate, you know, a neurotransmitter very responsible for brain functions like cognition and learning and memory. It's just not that you're not flooding those five H2A serotonin receptors with the same type of intensity as you would with a larger dose. But you're still kind of like you're kind of tickling those receptors instead of full on flooding them.

Well, what you're doing, and you've used the word neuroplasticity which is that the brain is actually always growing new cells. And there's very, very fine research that shows that cells which are exposed to microdoses develop more complexity, more dendrites, more capacity. So that the gradual use of microdoses as we're finding is helping people with very long term problems that conventional medicine has, has not been helpful for to improve. I mean, let me one that is a tragedy well known in the sports world is called concussions. And one of the things that you probably know is that the treatment for concussions is pretty much nothing. What you're given is help in finding workarounds for the part of you that doesn't work as well, but that isn't repair. What we're seeing, and this is with some professional athletes who've been retired at an early age due to, due to brain injuries, coming back from their lives of headaches, depression, anger and despair to being fully functioning.

Yeah, yeah.

And that is, that is something that classical high dose psychedelics have never, never really looked at. And it's highly unlikely that a single high dose session would have the same effect. Just as, you know, as I think you've talked about people who do excess workouts, you know, if you work out for 24 hours straight, that's not going to give you the same improvement as 12 one hour workouts, you know, spaced correctly. Right, right.

And that's interesting that you bring that up. I actually in the past year have introduced one NFL tight end and one NFL quarterback to almost like the classic Paul Stamets microdosing protocol of every three days stacking psilocybin with lion's mane and niacin, typically paired with some type of walk in nature, a little breath work and meditation to really pay attention to what the body and brain are doing afterwards. They both have a history of head injuries and have noted remaining remarkable improvements in their brain fog and focus upon embarking on around 10 weeks of that protocol every three days. And then I just returned from San Diego where I did an interview. It may have come out by the time we released this podcast with Navy SEAL Nick Norris and we had a pretty long discussion about his experience with ibogaine. Now granted, this was a larger dose of ibogaine, but he had a compelling amount of research on the decrease in neural inflammation post TBI in the Navy SEAL community upon the use of ibogaine, and had introduced several of his former active duty Navy Seals to that and they had all found it to be one of the most effective TBI and concussion treatments that they'd ever experienced.

So what you're telling me is that the research, which I call citizen science, isn't waiting for the double blind laboratory, highly expensive, and takes an incredibly long time to do studies that are also going on. So we're dealing with substances which are not only illegal, but widely available and in parts of the world that are a little more civilized about medicine. Legal, one can buy psilocybin mushrooms and truffles in the Netherlands, and because they're part of the eu, you can pretty much order them from around the eu so they're not waiting for the United States, which is historically lagged in these things, to finish the research because people who are suffering really don't react well. And you say, well, it's going to be four or five years before the science has done enough so that people can rush in and make a commercial company and put it price it out of your range. Anyway.

You know, I just mentioned one protocol, you know, that has been made popular by Paul Stamets. You know that that whole niacin, psilocybin, lion's mane stack every three days or so. But there are other microdosing protocols out there. You being someone who has either developed or at least seen the use of many of such protocols, would probably be the perfect person to ask this to. Is there a particular kind of gold standard or a few gold standard tried and true microdosing protocols that you think tend to be effective amongst a wide variety of the population?

Well, let me just step back to protocols because when I started doing this research there were no protocols. And I developed a research protocol which is taking it on day one, not taking it on day two, not taking it on day three and taking it on day four.

Taking what?

Taking a microdose, a single microdose and we'll get to stacking versus non stacking in a moment. That's known unfortunately as the Adamant protocol. Now I developed that because what we found early on is what's called the two day effect. And a great many reports say, hey, that second day is even better. Now, the second day, there's zero psychedelic in your system, just to keep in mind. But the body, of course, once it is in a recovery mode, doesn't stop recovering. The third day originally was so people could feel the way they felt before they started. And then when they wrote me, I would get information. Now after about 10 cycles or around 30 days, people began to report that the third day was pretty damn good too. That's a protocol that's widely used. And there's the reason for the spacing is because psychedelics have the reverse of addiction, which is they have something called tolerance, which is if you take a whole bunch of LSD the first day and you see God and you realize that you're a divinely realized being and your ankle no longer hurts. The second day you say, God, I'm going to do that again, I want to be back there. And you do that and you have a nice day and you have some visual beautiful things and the flowers smile at you and you feel good. And then the Third day you say, well, I'm going to do that again. And nothing happens. That for reasons that have not really been well studied, there's a. There's called tolerance, which is that your system says no more psychedelics for a while. And the more you stuff in, the more I just excrete that has led to quote protocols, all of which have days off. And the protocol that I know the most about is the one I gave you, one day on, two days off. Paul Stamets has a different protocol, which is four days on and three days off, or five days on and two days off. And at one point I asked Paul, I said, hey, people ask me all the time, you know, what's the Stamets protocol? Which is it? And he said, well, you can't be too rigid. Both are probably pretty good. When people say, well, what's the difference between your and Paul's? I said, well, one possibility is that Paul lives in a world where there are more mushrooms. Study being completed right now with 8,000 people who signed up on an app to microdose and to keep some records. And they had a choice of Paul's protocol or the one day on, two days off protocol. So we're getting, for the first time genuinely to see if there's any difference. And Paul and I are both predicting that there's almost no difference.

Now, another protocol that I'm familiar with is instead of taking a complete couple of days off in between microdoses, to rotate your microdoses. For example, on day one, a lysergamide, on day two, say a psilocybin. And on day three, something like a. A San Pedro or Wachuma. What about something like that to where you're microdosing every day but with a different type of substance?

Well, the notion is that the substances somehow affect you differently or else they're really, you know, it's saying, well, I'm switching my alcohol. I do rum on Mondays and scotch on Tuesdays and tequila on Wednesdays. So if you think of it in a different way, if, if the receptor, the 5 2a receptor is the primary receptor, and it. It might be. There's lots of evidence that there's other receptors, but that's a different, different game. Those three substances all affect the same receptor. So that, had I been asked about that protocol when it was being developed, I would have suggested days off. The other thing, of course, is very few people have access to all three of those substances at any given time. So we're really being a little exotic here. Yeah, but we know. I mean, again, I'm a minimalist, which is what's the least amount you take for the most benefit? And what we know is the Stamets protocol and the 211 protocol, according to, you know, the reports that I keep getting, is enough.

Yeah. And I think it's also important to point out the fact that you can play around with this a little bit. For example, if you're microdosing on a Thursday, and Thursdays and Fridays are incredibly busy, productive, creative, or cognitively demanding days for you, you might microdose on those days and then on a relaxing weekend, take two full days off. And then perhaps Monday's an easy day, too, so you take that day off. Then Tuesday's busy and you need more cognitive power, and so you microdose. And so sometimes saving your microdose for whichever day it's going to be, excuse me, most appropriate, similar to how you might drink, you know, two cups of coffee on a Monday morning, but none on a Sunday morning, is something else that can be taken into account. This idea that don't take it unless you need it and then save it for the days that you do anticipate needing it.

Well, here's what's interesting, which is that's what people come to. Now, I mentioned that we asked people to take it for 30 days and let us know how it's going to. What we also say is, hey, if you're still microdosing or not, let us know about that, too. So what we found is, on the whole, not, not everyone, but a great many people after they've done 10 cycles of microdosing, and this is for very serious issues as well, like chronic depression, they take it less often. And a number of people use it exactly as you're saying. They say, I use it for special occasions. And the one that comes to mind is someone who wrote and said, I took my driver's test and I flunked it twice. Now, in California, if you can't drive, you're at a severe disadvantage for almost everything else you do in your life because of our limited transportation, public transportation. So he said. So I took a microdose for the third test and I did very well. Now, could have been that just gave him more confidence, but that's how he was using it as a special boost. Exactly as you're suggesting.

Yeah. Now, what about. Because I mentioned that, for example, when I've recommended it to a few people, especially if people are just starting, I've told them to actually get away from the office, get Outside, go meditate or do some breath work. And really, for the first few times that you microdose, just go inside your body, pay attention to that with as few distractions as possible. Have you found that or any other type of best practice associated with the microdosing protocol to be something that you would recommend? Or do you say, just take your microdose and get after your day?

What's wonderful is you know and have described in great detail all the physiological changes and improvements that happen if you meditate and take a walk in nature. You're going to sense loading the microdose with other known benefits. And of course that's going to be better. But for many people, again, I don't recommend as much as I listen. And what I get from most people is they have made microdosing part of their day. And without intending to, there's a large number of reports that say, gee, I've gone back to meditating. Gee, I'm spending time in nature. And they also, by the way, report and great, great companies will tremble. As I say this, people tend to have less alcohol, less marijuana, and less coffee. And what they say is, I just don't feel the need. So what we're seeing is that if microdosing is simply improving the kind of overall effectiveness and health of the body, one would predict that the need for excess stimulants would decline. Now, that also, again, what's fun is when you get reports for, say, I'm taking it for such and such, but all this happened. And so we get these reports that say, I'm eating better, my sleep pattern has improved, except if I take a microdose too late in the day because it is a stimulant. So we're getting these reports of kind of general health improvement, even if they were taking it as a student to get better grades or as someone who had failed on six or eight antidepressants, was desperate. So what we're looking at, and of course, the improvements that you're suggesting, you know, are ideal. And if you add a microdose to that, what a wonderful way to start your day.

Yeah, yeah. And one other kind of logistical question, you know, we've talked about, for example, you know, every few days for, say, 10 weeks, or, you know, some people lose 12 weeks. What about instead of cycling in and out, just using this type of approach year round, is there anything that you have against that or have you seen that to be effective for people?

Well, you see, again, that's wonderful. Which is, if I look over the, you know, hundreds of reports. What people say is, and they've evolved this kind of on their own, and they tell each other, they say it's a good idea to take a few weeks off every couple of months. Now, I have no idea. Again, we're not able to do that kind of research, and it's almost impossible to do that kind of research on anything like a pharmaceutical. But what they're saying is they think that's a good idea. And when I look at, say, a Reddit thread of maybe 80 responses, 70 of them say, yeah, I do that too. I think that's a good idea. What we know is it will not harm you to stop taking something if you're still feeling the benefits. It's a conservative way that people have evolved on their own. And so I support it.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it's kind of similar to coffee. You know, I. For every three bags of decaf or caffeinated coffee, I order, I order one bag of decaf. And so when I'm out of those three bags of coffee, I switch to decaf so that my adenosine receptors are not being flooded with caffeine. They kind of reset after about seven to 10 days of not being stimulated by caffeine. And then when I return to caffeine, it's noticeable effect that way. I kind of drink coffee year round with a few breaks here and there, and that seems very effective. And I think the body just responds to those type of press pulse cyclings pretty well. And so I think that's a good way to go.

I think actually it's a nice version of the same thing for intense exercise, for building muscle.

Yeah, and exercise, we call it that periodization. And then you can say the same thing for nutritional periodization when it comes to anything from carbohydrates to coffee to now, of course, micro dosing. Now, in terms of. Of what you had mentioned earlier regarding stacks, you know, we, we had talked a little bit in the beginning of this podcast about, for example, the fact that I'll use theanine or magnesium L threonate to kind of bring down some of the overstimulative effects of something like lysergamide if I were to take a little bit too much, you know, or accidentally exceed 20 micrograms. And then we also talked about how to increase blood flow and some of the neuroplasticity. In the Stamets protocol, you would accompany psilocybin with niacin and lion's mane. Have you found other stacks to be particularly effective or Something that people are reporting success with.

Well, there's a company called Flow State Micro which has recently released information on what they're calling microdose minus one. I may get it wrong, but the minus one is the psilocybin. But it's a stack of several different mushrooms, slightly different than Paul's Stamets protocol. And they are working very often with very hard cases, people say with brain injuries or with alcoholism. And they report that works very well. My guess is, and this is not even an educated guess, is that little bit like the adding the breath work or meditation or walking, it's bound to improve the accessibility and utility use, you know, use of the microdose itself. So that seems to me the way we're going for many, many, many people who have don't know that or never thought about it. They report major shifts. And let me give you one of the major shifts, because it's among the most common reports I get, which is chronic depression. Now, chronic depression that we get, that we see in our reports are people who basically say, I have tried a lot of antidepressants. I've tried therapies. We have people who've done surgery. They come to microdosing. So they're not what we would call ideal clients. If you're trying to. If you were trying to sell the microdosing, these are the people who failed at everything. About 80% of them have a remarkable recovery from depression. And the recovery sounds almost always the same, which is, I'm back, I'm me again. I have my feelings. That's not the same effect as you get with an antidepressant. We actually did a little quick study.

Aside from maybe ketamine.

Well, ketamine again, the question is, how long does it last? When you ask how long does it last, then we're not sure that there's any neuroplasticity. We're not sure that the brain is laying down a new armature of healthy cells that don't have any interest in being depressed. And the other difference is when you actually look at the data for people that antidepressants work for, maybe half, they report that they can handle bad experiences better, meaning they are less sad. A lot of people also say, I'm so less sad that I'm numb. Okay. But let's say the ones who basically say, I'm less sad, and that's incredible for them, what we see with microdosing is the same effect, less sad, but we see another effect, which is that their good emotions go up that they are more cheerful, they're more curious, they're more kind, they are more glad as well as less sad. So it's a very different effect, even though we're looking at the same question of depression than antidepressants, even trifle, which which also suggests and Julie Holland talks about in her new book that there's obviously other things going on than the 5.2A and one of the things that's going on is an increase probably in oxytocin function. So that most people when they microdose and certainly when they take a high dose, they feel more loving. And that's not an effect that you'll ever get from an antidepressant.

Now is that Julie Holland's book, was it called Good Chemistry? I'll link to that one in the show notes if you guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com JimFadiman I haven't read that book yet, but it's on my list of books to check out. And I have certainly heard similar things about depression. And the other thing, the other use that I've heard about it that I think you also alluded to a little bit earlier was this idea of using it in between larger doses of psychedelics or plant medicines to continue to get some of the benefits of the so called downloads or personal insights or connection to that substance that you might have received from a larger dose. Is that also a common practice?

Well, actually I've heard it from you, not from me.

Okay.

Mainly because, mainly because I'm not in the prescribing. It's just not what I do. I try very hard to just listen to what comes in and report it back out because also that way I get incredible surprises. Again, what people are saying is that seems like a sensible idea. It's like the ibogaine person we talked about before. But again, you have to be careful that you're not overriding the body's own healing capacities. And after a high dose, what we know is there's four to six weeks where you are retaining a great deal of the social benefit, meaning you're really nicer, you're really more loving. We had to warn people in my early research days, don't make major life decisions within a week or two of a high dose experience. Why did we say that? Well, because we had a guy who had a great breakthrough, beautiful experience on Friday, met someone on Saturday and married her on Sunday.

I often will have deep, meaningful insights, ideas for articles, discussions that I need to have important discussions, changes to life that I need to make or to the way that certain relationships are structured. If I journey, which is pretty seldom for me, that might be three to four times a year max, that I would take what one would consider to be a trip dose of a substance. And I am always cognizant to do nothing with that information for about three days.

At least.

At least. Because any big decisions while that's still in your system can sometimes be made in a state of excitement or overwhelm or not taking into account all of the downstream butterfly effects of making a big decision. So that's a good point that you make that it's always important to just sit with it for a little while, sleep on it, so to speak, walk on it and take some time. And I think that when it comes to microdosing, at least in my own experience, that it's something that I'll take some time off after some type of a journey. But then when I begin to use those substances, particularly if it's the same substance that I had journeyed with prior, that I often will continue to get more important personal insights and so called downloads when using that same substance. So there's definitely something to combining infrequent trip doses with smaller microdoses of the same substance. In my opinion, I think it can be pretty effective.

Well, that's why the word integration is now coming into being. Integration says, now that you've, you know, now that you've seen God and that you know you're immortal, what are you going to do with your accounting job? And that's a big jump. One of the things that we're seeing is as people get aware of their different facets, their different selves, they begin to see who made that decision, you know, so well, gee, I think I'll quit my accounting job and I've already booked a trip to Nepal to sit with a guru whose name I don't know.

I bought my Birkenstocks, I've sold all my belongings, I'm headed to Nepal. Yeah, no, I've seen that happen occasionally and there's very few people in which that tends to work out versus taking your time and making an educated decision once your ego is back fully on board and you're actually thinking with just a little bit more rationality and logic, which at the same time fully thinking with rationality and logic and never stepping into that stuff. Slightly increased hemispheric coordination is something that some people miss out on and something that microdosing can help with. But if you're completely acting in a Dosed up state, you're going to basically be making decisions that someone who's perhaps constantly on drugs is going to take versus someone who's kind of rationally dialed in and sober, so to speak.

What comes to mind is my own first major, major experience as a graduate student. And I came down and I thought, my God, why did I pick this person, Jim Fadiman, this body? And being a graduate student, which is like a powerless position in the culture, how could I have done this? And I was simply puzzled from my high state, you know, why I was back being Jim Fadiman the graduate student. I would say now, 50 years or so later, I understand it was not a bad decision.

Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I have a few other questions for you. You know, and by the way, to kind of close that loop on stacks, just so folks know. I mean.

Oh, yes. Stacks is. Stacks is basically healthier, probably.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I've found, you know, we talked about, you know, for example, niacin for blood flow, but there are others, you know, ginkgo biloba or vinpocetine, which has been used in a lot of concussion and TBI research, and even for Alzheimer's and dementia by people like Delbredison. Carnitine would be another that can enhance blood flow. I've found that certain neuroprotectants can be very useful just because I think you can get a mild amount of neural inflammation from some of the increased cognitive load of some of these substances. So neural protections like astaxanthin or fisetin or quercetin, I found those to be very beneficial. And then there are certain things, and it sounds like the folks at this. This flow stack that you talked about, or flow state, are probably familiar with.

Flow state microbe, right?

Yeah. Certain things that can enhance the neurogenesis. Not just lion's mane, but some of these other mushrooms, you know, like cordyceps or chaga or mito.

Yeah, it's one of the areas where research and I guess more citizen science research is going on. As I say this. This is one group I've. I've seen. Seen the results.

Yeah.

And the other group I've looked at is Microdose Institute of the Netherlands, because they've been doing microdosing with coaching since 2017. So they have at least 1,000 people that they're looking at who they've actually worked with, not just sending them a substance, but actually working with them as the benefits of the substance or at least the effects of the substance. Come on.

Right, yeah. And then another very important one I think is, is any, any choline derivative simply because you'll exhaust your acetylcholine stores pretty rapidly if you're overstimulated with anything, you know, caffeine, nicotine, any of these microdoses, et cetera. So something like phosphatidylcholine or eating a larger amount of, say like egg yolks or walnuts or some other choline rich food on a microdosing day. I've also found that to be a very effective nutritional approach.

If I ever get commercial, will you be on my board?

Be happy to. Okay, so you also have a new book on multiplicity. And although we could of course do an entire podcast on that book, I read it recently. Considering the fact that we have limited time and can't get into the whole book, I would love to hear specifically how you would define multiplicity and whether microdosing plays into being able to assist with tapping into one's kind of multiple selves that you get into in that book.

Okay, well, the assumption, the observation that the book describes endlessly is that people have internal multiplicity and that healthy people are use it and that very successful people often are terribly conscious of it and they know they need to switch into a different self when they do a different part of their day. For example, there's a part of many people who say, I know I'm supposed to go to the gym today and I know it's good for me, but I don't want to do it. Then when they get to the gym, they say, God, I really forget how much I like this. Now what's happened is they've made a shift from the self that doesn't want to get out of bed in the morning to the self that loves exercise. Those people overlap, of course, in the same identity, but they're actually act as if they're different selves. And the other way of looking at it is if you've ever argued with yourself and the answer from everybody is yes, who is the other person? Who are you arguing with? The answer is another part of yourself that's the assumption. And from there we simply look at what happens when you begin to pay conscious attention to that just the way what happens when you pay conscious attention to your breathing? First thing you notice is your breathing changes. First thing that happens when you begin to notice what self you're in is you are more likely to go for a self that makes the best sense if you're working all day. Let's say your kind of work, which is very intellectually intense and you have kids and your kids really don't want to know all about the new discoveries with Choline. So you have to shift from very intense intellectual researcher to hi, I'm actually your father and I love you and I want to play some games or let's just run. Then when you're with close friends of one coin, you're one way and so forth. So that's in essence what we're looking at. And it turns out when people begin to think that way, their life starts to work better because they're more likely to be able to get into what we call the right mind at the right time. And that turns out to be simple sounding. But what it does is immediately you start to forgive yourself. You know, I don't know, I'm sure you have said, I don't know how I could have done that. Now the answer is you didn't. But the part of you that did it doesn't think it was difficult at all. What we know from alcoholics, one of the things that alcoholics like is they like the self. They get into up to a certain level of their drinking. And the person in the morning who has the hangover and the headaches and the stomach says, I hate drinking. And the answer is, yeah, well, you don't drink. I your night self do and I never have a hangover. So we're really looking at a healthy, normal internal division. And when you start looking that way, suddenly one is you're kinder to yourself because you forgive yourself for the things that you parts of you did. And then the other wonderful thing is you look at your spouse, your significant other, or your children and you say, oh, there's a part of them that just drives me nuts, but it's just a part of them. It's much easier with our children because we tend to forgive our children all faults because we love them, but we don't deny their faults. Yeah, but if we see that their faults, so to speak, are just a part of them, it suddenly shifts it.

I've certainly noticed that myself, particularly with microdosing, I do interact with people in slightly different ways. I am a slightly different me, especially in terms of social ability and empathy. Social ability and empathy are probably the two biggest things I've noticed because I'm actually tend to naturally be a somewhat introverted, non empathetic person. And I have found that certain substances seem to enhance my ability to be able to step into that, I guess slightly multiplicitous version of myself.

Well, you step into the right person at the right time and what microdosing does, it just makes it easier because again, if your system's working better, then the switching part of it that moves from self to self works better. Let me give you just personal example. The last time I traveled, we remember travel, I went to Utah and I was going to give a talk to about 500 people. And I liked it. I liked the idea. And I was feeling physically terrible. And I literally. I was in the green room, the little room off stage before you go on, and I thought, I wonder what will happen if I faint during this talk? And I thought, that's going to be just terrible, but we'll see what happens. So I was feeling that kind of lack of capacity, whatever vital energy was. I didn't have much. I walked on stage, I sat down in the chair, I said something appropriate and light to the audience. They clearly, since they'd all paid for it, wanted it to be a wonderful evening. And I could feel my body shift. And I gave for me a really good talk. It was interesting, it was funny, it was moving. People wanted the information, I wanted to give it to them. Afterwards, I was highly energized. I took audience questions and individual questions and I was just filled with incredibly healthy energy. That's what shifting does.

Yeah.

Now, as the evening wore on and it got near the end of the evening, I was. I was literally not. Not well again and slept long and so forth. But that's what shifting can do. And we know it happens in athletics, we know it happens in professional sports. I mean, remember, you have people in professional sports who have some incredible injury and they just keep playing. So we know the extremes of what switching into the right self can do. And what we found is switching into the right self so that when you come home, you're a loving husband or wife is as important as these extremes of. Of war and sports.

Right. Just being. Just being able to tap into the dynamic nature of your personality. It's a very interesting book. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Stuff that I don't think a lot of people have talked about. So that one, for those of you listening in, is called your symphony of selves, and I'll put that1@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Jim Fadiman as well. Now, of course, I would be remiss, not to mention the fact that there are certain substances, when we speak of stacking, that one should take great caution with when it comes to combination with microdoses. And fortunately, if you go to that website I mentioned earlier, themicrodosingpsychedelics.com, there is mostly self reports anecdotes that you should be aware these are anecdotes, not human clinical research studies showing which type of particularly pharmaceutical medications, from antifungals to antihistamines to benzodiazepines, would be appropriate and potentially safe with microdoses and which would not be. And so I'd recommend that you access that website for information on that, just so you're well informed. The other thing, and I'm gonna ask you this question, Jim, and I don't know what your answer will be, but I want to ask it to you because I know it's one of the first questions people are gonna leave in the comments section. You might anticipate what I'm gonna ask, but people will say, where do I get a microdose? Where do I get my hands on a product? What, what is your typical answer to something like that? Or atypical answer?

Well, of course I will send you a list of illegal drug dealers and I will give you their emails and their addresses.

No, I won't make sure to use Gmail. So it's all trackable.

Exactly. No, the fact of the matter is two things. One is mushrooms don't know they're illegal. And places like England, there's a mushroom called a fairy cap that grows all over England. And people write me about going out collecting and that's true of all the other natural substances. The curious thing is, and I deliberately maintain fairly high level of ignorance here on how to get it is it's remarkable how few people worry about that. And when people have written me, they say, hey, there's no way I can possibly find anything. I run a small machine shop in a small town in Iowa. No one I know has ever heard of a psychedelic. And I say, why don't you ask around? And two days later I get a report says, got it Right. So these substances are remarkably available. And if one again is living in Europe, one can order psilocybin truffles. Truffles are the immature mushroom just before it breaks the surface. If you're in Canada, a number of the LSD analogs are available through mail order from my friends in Los Angeles and other major cities for reasons that make sense if you understand basic human economics, which is if people want something that's good for them, the fact that it's illegal will not prevent it being available.

Yeah, it's kind of funny because in the past, the nerdy physiologist in me, because I took a lot of pharmacology and more advanced nutrition and biochemistry courses at University of Idaho, I would simply find out what the active ingredient was in a substance, then go to a laboratory chemical website like Sigma Aldrich and order just the, you know, the not safe for human consumption quote unquote version of that and kind of get a. Get a exposed to the effects. But I have actually found nothing to compare to securing the plant in its whole extract, such as a psilocybin mushroom. And it seems to have a far better effect than say, the isolated chemical derivative, although that's what I know that some people are doing.

Again, we haven't yet had research, but some of the. Since there are now a dozen companies that say they're going to be selling you synthetic psilocybin, someone's going to compare the two because there are also several companies saying we're only going to use the natural. Psilocybin is one of about five alkaloids in the mushroom that have psychodynamic effects. Psilocybin is the one that's the most, but it may not be the most important. Similarly, as we found with Cannabis, cannabis has 400 alkaloids. THC is one, CBD is one. The chances that nature just threw in the other hundred, you know, several hundred alkaloids because they had it available is very unlikely.

Yeah, yeah. It's just like the effects on prostate cancer of isolated lycopene supplementation versus consumption of whole tomatoes. They've actually found the latter to be more beneficial. The same could be said of, you know, ascorbic acid from orange or acerola cherry or goji berry versus, you know, a vitamin C derivative or turkey tail.

Mushrooms on breast cancer.

Right, right, exactly.

So, yeah. So the natural, you know, I guess my theory is nature had took a long time to build these substances into these plants and fungus. Maybe it knew what it was doing.

Yeah.

Now of course that would assume then it also developed us. And we can say it knew what it was doing, but we also know it didn't do as good a job as we wished.

Right. Well, this is absolutely fascinating and I'm sure that people are going to have plenty of questions. And so what I recommend that you do, if you want to jump in with your own questions, your comments, your feedback, you know, your own experience with microdosing, then you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Jim Fadiman just like it sounds G I M F A D I m a n Leave your comments there and I'll try and hop in and give you a helpful reply. Just don't ask me where to get microdoses because I get about 10 messages a day about that and I'm just not going to reply.

Well, if you go to the website microdosingpsychedelics.com, your basic questions will be answered. And at least in two places on that site it says don't ask us.

That's probably prudent. That cuts down on the amount of communication back in forth. Well, Jim, I will link to all your websites, to your books, including your two new books, the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, which I guess isn't new, but the Symphony of Selves is the newer one. I believe you're also working on a title about microdosing specifically, are you not?

I'm dealing with the fact that I probably will be writing the Microdose book, but don't wait for it at this point.

Well, I will look forward to reading it when it comes out. And in the meantime, folks, again, show notes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Jim Fadiman. Jim, this has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the show, man.

This was really my pleasure, Ben, and you know it.

All right, folks, well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Jim Fadiman signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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