Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

There is a subjective difference in how much people think it helps them.

So if I give someone a year of psychotherapy, they're going to be 70% better in relation to their ADHD.

If I give someone Adderall, they're going to be 30% better with their ADHD.

But if I ask someone, how much better are you?

The Adderall person will say, I am way better.

I'm like 100% better.

And the psychotherapy person will say, I'm about maybe 50, 30, 70% better.

They'll say something like that.

And that's because we have this bias in our brain where the speed of something working increases the magnitude of the effect.

So since Adderall works right away, since I notice a difference, that sort of my brain sort of changes the calculation.

I don't need to get more into that, but I hope that sort of makes sense.

The more immediate effects are, the more we think something is effective.

This is why things like Xanax and opium and opioid medications feel like they're amazing because they hit us really fast.

And if they hit us really fast, the brain confuses that with being very effective.

So our brain confuses onset of action and speed of effect with magnitude of effect.

This is basically what I think is going on with microdosing, where a lot of people feel like they're doing better.

But if we look at a lot of the data that looks, if we look at studies that look at long-term effects, there seems to be a very small effect.

So let's take a quick look at a few studies.

So here's a study that's a systematic study of microdosing psychedelics.

So analyses of pre and post study measures revealed reductions in reported levels of depression and stress, lower levels of distractibility, increased absorption and increased neuroticism.