WHEN Ayelet Waldman, 52, took her first dose of LSD, she didn’t hallucinate or fall into a psychedelic, colourful trip.

During her month-long “microdosing” experiment, she slipped 10 micrograms of acid underneath her tongue, about a 10th of the typical recreational dose, every third day.

Instead of inducing wild, trippy illusions, the Californian mother-of-four says LSD saved her life.

“For the first time in so long, I feel happy,” she writes in A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My Life, her new book released this month.

“Not giddy or out control, just at ease with myself and the world. When I think about my husband and my children, I feel a gentle sense of love and security. I am not anxious for them or annoyed with them. When I think of my work, I feel optimistic, brimming with ideas, yet not spilling over.”

“My depression was destroying my marriage and my previous treatment had stopped working,” she told news.com.au.

Those who experiment with microdosing say taking a very small dose of LSD enhances their brain functionality, helps them focus and encourages warm feelings of content.

“They won’t have visual distortion or visible changes in their thinking,” said Stephen Bright from Curtin University’s National Drug Research Institute.

“By taking a smaller does — a non psychoactive dose — there are anecdotes that it improves people’s cognitive functioning, their emotional stability, creativity and helps them be more focused and present,” Dr Bright said.

“The problem is that these are just anecdotes. There is no research that has been conducted on microdosing. We need to conduct randomised, controlled trials to see what happens.” (Researchers at Macquarie University are currently looking for volunteers to take part in an anonymous study about microdosing).

In her book, Ms Waldman writes that microdosing makes her “feel a tiny bit more aware, as if my consciousness is hovering at a slight remove, watching me tap the keys on my keyboard, rub my ankles together, sip a mouthful of tea and swallow it. The trees look prettier than usual; the jasmine smells more fragrant.

“It suddenly occurs to me that I feel mindful, a feeling I have tried to achieve through meditation, though I always come up with zip. I am finding it a little bit easier to notice both my thoughts and my body moving through space.”

There’s a whole Reddit community dedicated to sharing microdosing stories online. While many report increased productivity — “For the whole day I felt energised, organised and happy and I also was a lot more tuned in than I usually am” — others say it exacerbates mental illness.

Microdosing is hugely popular in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, where workers try to “hack” their brains as they strive to gain an edge in the ever-competitive corporate space.

When a great idea can earn you millions of dollars — apps like Uber, Snapchat and Tinder once started as tiny ideas — there’s an extra incentive to have your brain always working at full capacity.

“Smart drugs” or nootropics, are already gaining popularity among those who want an energy boost and to increase brain performance.

“Entrepreneurs and executives and investors are not normal people,” Molly Maloof, who works with lots of biohacking clients from top-tier Silicon Valley tech companies, told The Mercury News.

“They are like high-performance race cars that are non-stop moving, and they need pit stops more often than normal people.”

Dr Bright says this competitive desire to supercharge our brains is worrying.

“I think there is increasing pressure in the workplace to take cognitive enhancing or performance-enhancing drugs,” he said.

“It’s not just microdosing but other drugs like Modafinil [a eureroic, or wakefulness promoting agent, often used by shift workers]. It’s quite popular among CEOs because you can focus for long times with little sleep.

“It’s a societal problem now ... how much work do we need to do? If all of your colleagues are microdosing and they’re performing better than you, it puts pressure on you to perform, to engage in that behaviour.”

But Ms Waldman wasn’t trying to create a new app or win a six-figure bonus. She just wanted to feel happy again.

“I was depressed and desperate,” she told news.com.au.

“[LSD] made me feel significantly better. Less depressed and less inclined to fly off the handle.”

While she wouldn’t encourage others to try it — “I don’t recommend criminal activity” — she says before her month-long experiment, she was on the verge of suicide.

Had her despair and panic continued for much longer, she would have destroyed her marriage.

“It was almost the first time in my life I had perspective on what my moods are,” she told The New Yorker.

“Now, when I slip back into the bad feelings, I know it could get better overnight. And also: there is better.”

Even her children noticed a change. “You’ve been much happier,” her younger daughter tells her. “You’ve been controlling your emotions. Like, when you’re angry, you’re super-chill.”

While any doctor or scientist will point you towards the gaping lack of evidence to support microdosing as a mental health treatment, anecdotes like Ms Waldman’s are hard to ignore.

As the The New York Times wrote in its review of her book: “In normalising the conversation about LSD, she may one day help others feel normal.”

rebecca.sullivan@news.com.au