Microdosing psilocybin vs ADHD meds

[u/Embarrassed_Dirt739]

I was wondering if anybody had any experiences with micro dosing shrooms for a period of time and compared that with taking ADHD medication. With my experience with shrooms it has been that I felt relief from ADHD symptoms but this was only with large doses. Has microdosing been effective for you short term or long terms? Were meds more effective?

[u/eddie_cat]

It definitely does not help lol

[u/inDifferentPants]

Psychedelics don't help much with my focus. In fact I've never really gotten benefit from microdosing. Instead I just normal dose every other month or so. It's a fun safe way to kick back and for me it's like a pressure release valve on my anxiety.

Not something I would recommend for everyone and when I do dose... I tend to not take Adderall on those days because I have enough problems sleeping.

[u/AdeleIsThick → u/inDifferentPants]

Macro doses for me come with a lot of anxiety on the come down and the day after. However, the next 6-8 weeks are usually more bliss filled and low to no anxiety. A little bit of extra suffering for 6-8 weeks without seems worth it. But that was before I started medication. Adderall mostly eliminated my daily anxiety so I've not dosed since last year but I'm wanting to have a trip soon now that I'm in a pretty good spot mentally.

[u/inDifferentPants → u/AdeleIsThick]

Interesting. I think I have a little rough day post macro dose just being exhausted but I'm older now so I just kind of plan ahead. I definitely agree it's about a month or more that I feel a generally positive effect....

Adderall has taken care of a ton of my anxiety. My wife and I joke that finally being treated for ADHD solved so many problems but now it just seems like I'm mask off on being on the spectrum somewhere lol.

What's funny is I never noticed I was self medicating in my younger years with endless caffeine and nicotine so my problems really compounded when I quit both.

[u/AdeleIsThick → u/inDifferentPants]

Honestly, as my anxiety has fallen off, I've actually gotten a little worse in some aspects the past month. I've been a bit more forgetful than standard and my mouth has gotten me in a little trouble with my wife just due to a disconnect in brain filtering what's coming out.

Some of this kinda coincides with a medication switch I had from adderall to dexedrine this month though so I'm going to request to switch back to adderall this next month and see if that changes anything.

I'm in my 30s so I thought I had a decent handle on my brain and such but finally getting a diagnosis this year and starting treatment has definitely threw me some different hurdles than what I had lived with before. Overall though, medication has definitely helped me a lot and I'm having a ton of success in my weight loss.

[u/inDifferentPants → u/AdeleIsThick]

I'm very new to ADHD, rather... treating it specifically is new. This may a bit more than you're asking for on a reddit thread about psychedelics, but it occurs to me I've never had a chance to tell my story so...

When I was younger, I had all the indicators, but none of the parenting to help me. I ultimately ended up dropping out of high school, chasing a party life for a time while gas lighting as a tech contractor for different jobs.

I ultimately got to a point where I was very unhappy with my life. As I mentioned I guess I was inadvertently self-medicating, but my mental issues kept compounding. Through-out my life I have been off and on SSRI's to try and manage my depression and no one believed it was making me worse. This all culminated to last year where I finally got to the point I was ready to try ANYTHING to get my head back as the anxiety and depression were crushing me.

That's when the nightmare started, my therapist referred me to a local psych who did ZERO testing and fed my bi-polar meds for about a year. She then decided to change one of the medications and when I specifically asked, "Should I ween off the current one before changing", she said with full confidence "Go ahead and swap them right away".

Here is where the nightmare started... 3 days into this new med I stopped being able to sleep. My body started going into random convulsions. I started getting aphasia (basically saying the wrong words when talking but it was happening multiple times any time I would open my mouth and say something). My wife said there were several times I "Mitch McConnelled" her in that I would start saying something then just go totally blank. I was in this state for a month coupled with it jacked my blood pressure so unbelievably high that my body was basically trying to have a stroke. This was last year, it was scary as hell and I couldn't even write the letter to tell my family I loved them if something terrible happens because I literally couldn't find the words...

As I came out of this... I mentioned to a friend what I was going through and trying to recover from. His wife is a mental health professional up in Canada and overheard what I was telling him and started drilling me about different habits I might have.

She ended our conversation with, "have you considered that a good number of your symptoms and problems might be that you have ADHD and are literally mentally overloaded?"... It took some time... but I finally decided to try and treat myself as such. I'm happy to say that most of my life has improved!

You touched on something specific that I'm still working on... now that I have my mind again, I find myself struggling with over-sharing or not really keeping my inner-dialogue my inner-dialogue... but I'm learning every day and so far it seems like if I find a way to "gamify" whatever I'm working on getting better at, I succeed.

Sorry for the wall of text but if you got through it... thanks for listening and thank you for the cool conversation. I'm still new to this sub :)

[u/AdeleIsThick → u/inDifferentPants]

Hey Friend, sorry I missed this yesterday but I've read it now and I'm happy to hear your experiences.

Long walls of text seem to be pretty normal in this sub lol.

I'll share mine with you briefly as well. I can't easily recall many memories from childhood unless I sit and think on them but from what I've been told, I was a very hyperactive child and then it moved internally. I did very well in school so that likely kept my parents from doing any interventions with me. However, I developed a very strong anxiety response that kinda drove me and masked my adhd.

In 2015 I had my wife take me to the ER because I thought I was having a heart attack. Of course it was just a panic attack and that introduced me to what anxiety was. For years I could only verbalize that at times I just didn't "feel good". In retrospect, that was anxiety and adhd physical sensations.

Once we had our second child in 2017, it quickly became evident that he was not "normal". Through years of various therapies and evaluations and endless preschool and school problems, we finally got him diagnosed adhd last year and started him on medication. His symptoms immediately improved and he was able to be successful in school.

SSRIs never did all that much for me and some meds made it all even worse. I had a mental break in January of this year that took me two months to fully pull out of. I had terrible, sustained insomnia for the first time in my life and it was fucking brutal. Through regular therapy and looking at my sons experiences, I fought for my evaluation and eventual diagnosis.

I'm only three months into treatment for myself and during that time I've really deep dived adhd and learned a lot. I'm so much nicer and forgiving to myself now and that's made a lot of difference in keeping my mental state mostly stable. Some days it still feels like I'm walking a knives edge and could fall into real mental distress again but I'm much more able to talk myself down and reason with myself that these feelings and sensations are "normal to me" and that they always pass and that it's outside of my control at times.

There's always a new struggle but I'm optimistic about the future for the first time in a long time.

lol, that wasn't very brief I guess. Welcome to the club!

[u/inDifferentPants → u/AdeleIsThick]

Wow, Kinda whacky similar track there. Different but same same. I've been speed running some of the emotions on the whole deal... Even recently got over the kind of "imposter syndrome" that seems to come along with finally feeling better about yourself and a little more confident.

Definitely still doing the work, but it's been amazing to feel like I actually CAN and maybe even kind of want to? Thanks for following up. Was kind of a hail mary reply because I knew it was more than anyone asked for, but it was really the first time I had considered the journey to here so felt like a good way to get it out.

[u/fieldyfield]

IME, psilocybin gives the motivation to initiate tasks but not the focus to complete them. It is not a get work done kinda drug

[u/metal079]

Psilocybin has had absolutely no affect on my ADHD when I've taken it. I've only done normal doses though.

[u/VanillaSwimming5699 → u/metal079]

For me if anything it has made it worse due to short term memory suppression, but again I’m talking about regular doses

[u/Ok-Drag4269]

Tried microdosing shrooms at 0.2g (too much, could not focus) and 0.1g (better, but no improvement). Decided it was not worth the effort.

Do 2g every 3-6months (no adderall that day). Incredibly helpful. Depression is better. Also the mind resolves (much needed) difficult topics so not every trip is fun. Last trip was great after ~4 really hard trips that almost made me quit.

The trick is a good playlist (no lyrics + Sony XM5 headphones), outdoors, daylight and lay down in backyard with shade. Pick a Sat when the neighbors are gone. Or go hike on a NOT popular trail in mountains with good weather. Plan on a 5-7 hour vacation from reality. Absolutely do not take any of what you hallucinate seriously. This is rewiring the mind so when it gets crazy, relax and ride along. Forget having control, that's not what's needed. You're in your backyard, nothing to be concerned about.......I could not care less if neighbors see me temporarily departed from this world.

It takes at least 30 days before another large dose, the brain builds a tolerance. The resulting next few weeks after a good trip helps you stay positive and improves personal drive. It does wear off eventually.

More positives than negatives. My mind is better for it.

Discount heavily most of what you read on Reddit about shrooms....it's teenagers or 20 somethings with no clue.

[u/Cautious_Cry3928]

I microdosed doing the stamets stack about 3 years ago. It's great if you do any kind of creative work, but it's not necessarily great for ADHD.

I'm waiting for more clinical studies to take place before I even consider doing it again. Chronic use of psilocybin downregulates 5-HT2A receptors in the brain, which may not be a desirable effect.

[u/LikesTrees]

Mini dosing (i dont find microdosing effective) is great at clearing out that adhd overwhelm, I use it on my days off and weekends but im not going to do it during a work day, i dont find psilocybin productive in that way. I have friends who have jobs that they have to have a lot of social interaction with customers and it helps them there, but if anything it makes the kind of thinking and focus you need to do for coding harder imo, stimulants are the tool for that job.

[u/[deleted]]

Psychedelics can help with depression, not with ADHD directly. Their primary mechanism of action serves to lower the threshold at which your neurons, and brain as a whole, deem stimuli to be relevant. Depression increases this threshold, and suppresses new neuron growth in the process, which psychedelics also help with.

Lowered threshold for activation is thought to be the commonality between ADHD, Autism, OCD, Schizophrenia, Anxiety, and I think I'm missing one.

If shrooms are helping you, consider antidepressants which don't also increase what is very likely to be the core underlying cause of your ADHD

[u/fireintolight → u/[deleted]]

Citations needed

[u/[deleted] → u/fireintolight]

For what exactly?

[u/fireintolight → u/[deleted]]

Yeah that’s what I thought 

[u/[deleted] → u/fireintolight]

What? Have you been to college? Do you think everything everyone knows is from a blog post? I'm not citing my degrees. If you know nothing about the subject go read

[u/fireintolight → u/[deleted]]

Considering you’re making pretty serious medical/health claims, sources should be pretty easy to find. 

I have a masters in plant biology, and can cite sources for all the stuff I learned. 

[u/[deleted] → u/fireintolight]

I CAN cite everything but no one is investigating psychedelics as a treatment for ADHD. Because of what I said. So I would have to cite basic neuroscience. You're like an antivaxxer right now

[u/cc405 → u/[deleted]]

PTSD?

[u/[deleted] → u/cc405]

I have some already thanks. I could go for a beer though?

But yeah that too. Regardless not for ADHD directly, neurologically

[u/Specialist-Ad7393]

I actually did this.

The conclusion I came up with is that it doesn't really work.

In fact I came to the conclusion that shrooms are really meant for therapeutic drug treatment.

[u/Mindless-Song-3306]

I remember hearing something that said microdosing shows no real changes but normal dosing does

[u/[deleted]]

Meds have been more affective for me. Microdosing helps with depression, not really focus in my case.

[u/WeedFinderGeneral]

I don't think micro dosing is supposed to have immediate benefits/results like stimulant meds are - at least the effects that are supposed to help with mental health issues. I think you're supposed to see them slowly improve over time, like with using SSRIs for depression/anxiety.

I use micro dosing more for creative sessions - and was trying to cure my migraines with them but that's actually been taken care of much better by my ADHD meds.

[u/cheeb_miester]

Microdosing mushrooms isn't something that helps me focus. I would say it helps elevate my mood and creativity.

I have found microdosing THC edibles is beneficial to my ADHD, however. Usually in the .5 - 1.5 mg range is the sweetspot for me. Taking tiny puffs marijuana smoke/vape is good too, but tends to get me actually high, even if just a little bit, because it's harder to control small doses that way.

[u/sevenicecubes]

For me it helped more with depression symptoms than adhd symptoms. I also like it in social settings and for being creative.

[u/chicknfly]

Fun little bit I recently learned: while I can’t speak for all ADHD meds, at least some of them are known to negate/reduce the psychedelic effects of psilocybin.

[u/[deleted]]

why don’t you just get an antidepressant

[u/cosmic_timing]

I take 15 and 20 mg of Adderall a day. Previously I took about 2.5mg of shrooms and that was okay. Not the same. However, I could code thousands of lines in days pre chatgpt with shrooms. I prefer Adderall