For most people it's coffee. For some, Red Bull or Adderall. And for the truly diehard, there's Soylent.
But for a growing number of Silicon Valley professionals looking to add that extra productivity edge, the drug of choice is LSD, Rolling Stone reports.
The practice is called "microdosing."
Users take LSD at roughly a tenth of the normal amount to avoid the drug's mind-bending hallucinogenic effects — and instead feel a little something extra in the background.
"People do it and they're eating better, sleeping better, they're often returning to exercise or yoga or meditation," psychologist James Fadiman, perhaps the foremost expert on microdosing, recently told Motherboard. "It's as if messages are passing through their body more easily."
People who microdose tend to report feeling more alert, more invigorated, and more creative. They approach familiar problems in a new way, even if they can't always vocalize where the insights are coming from. They say microdosing just works.
It's unclear whether there are actually any clinical benefits to microdosing. Fadiman has received loads of self-reports from people, most claiming to have positive microdosing experiences, but there haven't yet been any randomized, double-blind controlled studies.
Even if the drug is a placebo, it still seems to work for some people.
As Rolling Stone reports, one 25-year-old Silicon Valley programmer (whom Rolling Stone calls "Ken") regularly microdoses because it helps improve his sales performance. "Microdosing has helped me come up with some new designs to explore and new ways of thinking," Ken says.
Fadiman says microdosing every fourth day can help people relieve symptoms related to chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, and migraines.
Based on the sheer volume of reports he's received over the years, Fadiman is pushing for clinical trials on the practice — to see whether it's all in people's heads, or if taking small hits of acid twice a week can actually improve lives.
