I microdosed 1P-LSD from April to December 2017 following a regimen: one day on, threeish days off. It’s been over a year since I stopped that routine and tapered my dosing to as-needed for mood support.

Eight months is a bit longer than most “microdosing experts” recommend. Online sources typically suggest six weeks or three months, but that’s mostly speculative. Any recommendations for continued psychedelic use (and all psychiatric medicine?) are relatively inexpert given our still premature understanding of the brain. When it comes to intimate psychological issues, there is no single cure for what has complex — and largely unknown — causes. No one knows which precise treatment or prescription will work for anyone. Especially in people with discreet or hard-to-diagnose issues, who experience difficulty communicating, or who are especially young or old. It’s all an experiment. That’s what the medical community has been doing, as well as a few rogue individuals.

Testing, and reflecting.

So that’s what I did. After decades of severe mood swings, met with inadequate personal and medical response, I decided to try microdosing.

Within hours of my first microdose I was able to step outside of old habits and gridlocks of thought. Prior to dosing, I could spend a whole day inside my apartment, going back and forth between obsessive, addictive behaviors. Checking social media, eating without hunger, picking at myself in the mirror. All would lead to shame and isolation. I’d think to myself, I can’t go out like this, and bail on work and friends regularly. It’s disturbing how much time I spent in that headspace. An extremely uncomfortable way to be.

On that first dose, I felt a renewed awe being in the world. I walked to Hasenheide, a nearby park I’d been through many times before, and felt like I was discovering it for the first time, noticing all its beauty. Finding new paths. I was finally able to leave the tunnels of thoughts and spiraling storylines. The world was rewriting itself before my eyes, and I could read it, be in it, and detach from the reruns in my head that led to damaging behaviors and kept me locked inside. That April in Berlin changed everything.