LSD microdosing could increase the duration of sleep the following night, according to the largest study of its kind. The unexpected finding may help to explain why the practice has been associated with improved mental health.
Microdosing involves regularly taking psychedelic substances like LSD or psilocybin at doses that are too small to produce hallucinations but may still boost creativity and well-being.
“We became interested in LSD microdosing because lots of people are doing it and claiming mental health benefits,” says at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who studies treatments for depression.
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As a preliminary investigation, Muthukumaraswamy and his colleagues randomised 80 men aged 25 to 56 without mental health conditions to take a microdose (10 micrograms) of LSD or a placebo every third morning for six weeks.
The men filled out daily questionnaires about how they felt and wore Fitbits to track their physical activity and sleep. “It was very exploratory, we had no hypotheses, we just thought we’d try to measure everything we possibly could,” says Muthukumaraswamy.
The LSD group reported feeling happier and more connected and creative on the days they microdosed, consistent with .
A more curious finding was that the LSD group slept for the same length of time as the placebo group when they had microdosed that day, but went to bed earlier and slept for an extra 24 minutes on average the following night, even though physical activity levels were the same between the groups.
“No one was expecting to sleep more and no one even seemed conscious of it, so it’s hard to explain as a placebo effect,” says Muthukumaraswamy. One explanation could be that the psychoactive effects of LSD stimulate extra processing in the brain that increase its sleep requirements the next day, but “we really don’t know yet”, he says.
Interventions that boost sleep by more than 20 minutes are generally considered clinically relevant, meaning they can be beneficial for people who are sleep deficient, says at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
“But I don’t get why the extra sleep happens the night afterwards,” he says. “Typically, whatever we do during the day affects synaptic connections in our brain today and affects our sleep tonight.”
Closer monitoring of LSD microdosers’ sleep using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures the brain’s electrical activity, may help to unravel the mechanisms, says Drummond.
Muthukumaraswamy believes the extra sleep gained by LSD microdosing might explain why after taking up the practice, since the condition is often closely tied with sleep problems.
Later this month, his team will begin with depression to see if they also experience improvements in mood and sleep, and if so, whether the two are linked.
Many existing antidepressants, including SSRIs, cause sleep disturbances in some people, so there is a need for alternative treatments that improve sleep, says Muthukumaraswamy.
medRxiv
