This survey (n=1219) assessed the relationship between psychedelic use, mindfulness and wellbeing in people who engage in both meditation practices and psychedelic use. Mindfulness and mystical experiences were found to predict increases in well-being while psychedelic induced mystical experiences explain improvements in wellbeing.

Abstract

“Rationale: Both psychedelics and mindfulness are a recently emerging topic of interest in academia and popular culture alike. Personal meditation practices and recreational psychedelic use have consistently increased in the past decade. While clinical work has shown both to improve long-term wellbeing, the data on naturalistic applications of psychedelics and mindfulness is rather lacking.

Objective: The current study aims to examine the relationship between psychedelic use, mindfulness, and multi-faceted wellbeing as an outcome. Hierarchical regression was used to quantify these associations on a large sample of people (N = 1219), who engage in both meditation practices and psychedelic use.

Results: These results show that both mindfulness and mystical experiences each predict substantial increases in wellbeing. Psychedelics were found to be an important moderator of mystical experience to explain improvements in wellbeing.

Conclusions: These data are among the first to establish a strong relationship between personal mindfulness practice, recreational psychedelic use, and overall psychological wellbeing in a naturalistic framework.”

Authors: Tianhong T. Qiu & John P. Minda

Summary

Psychedelic use and mindfulness are both recently emerging topics of interest, and the current study aims to examine the relationship between psychedelic use, mindfulness, and multi-faceted wellbeing in people who engage in both meditation practices and psychedelic use.

The current study focuses on the “classical” psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and mescaline, but also includes MDMA, which elicits similar effects. The study is the first to establish a strong relationship between personal mindfulness practice, recreational psychedelic use, and overall psychological wellbeing in a naturalistic framework.

Psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and DMT have been shown to occasion mystical experiences in controlled clinical settings. These mystical experiences are characterized by a sacred sense of unity, truth, and reverence, transcendence of space and time, positive mood, and ineffability.

Mindfulness is a subset of meditation practices that involves training of deliberate attentional focus, often on the breath, sounds, or bodily sensations. Mindfulness has been adopted by both the public and researchers alike and has shown utility in reducing negative affect, stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms.

Many people report that psychedelic use and mindfulness practice offers similar insights and benefits. Neuroimaging studies suggest that the neural correlates of meditation and psychedelic states are comparable.

Studies have found that combining psychedelics with meditation leads to stronger benefits in wellbeing beyond the effect of either practice in isolation. These benefits include decreased negative affect, decreased mood disorder symptoms, and increased positive affect, spirituality, life purpose, life meaning, and wisdom. Evidence from clinical research suggests psychedelics can improve wellbeing via induction of strong mystical experiences. However, the potential for psychedelics to improve wellbeing during naturalistic use is relatively unexamined.

Many studies suggest that mindfulness practices such as MBSR, MCBT and meditation can improve wellbeing, but there haven’t been any reported explicit investigations into how recreational psychedelic-mediated mystical experiences lead to improvements in wellbeing.

The current study aims to examine how mindfulness and psychedelic-mediated mystical experiences influence multidimensional facets of psychological wellbeing.

Hypotheses were pre-registered on Open Science Framework (OSF) prior to data collection. Seven explicit hypotheses were registered, and seven exploratory hypotheses were tested.

We used a cross-sectional survey design and three successive multiple regression models to analyze the relationship between COVID-19 affliction and the MEQ. The effects of COVID-19 affliction on the MEQ were examined using Welch’s two-tailed independent samples t-tests and Holm-Bonferroni method.

Participants were recruited from two distinct sources: (1) Online interest communities relevant to psychedelics and meditation such as Reddit communities, and (2) undergraduate students. They reported relatively young first age of use and highly variable total lifetime doses of psychedelic drugs.

Participants were asked about their gender, ethnicity, religion, and ISCED education level. They were also asked if they participated in meditation practices or psychedelic use, and were further prompted with questions about their age of first use, which drugs they use, lifetime doses, and estimated average dose. Data were collected during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, and included participants testing positive, family or friends testing positive, and general attitudes towards the pandemic.

The Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) is a 39 item questionnaire that evaluates trait mindfulness. It has a high reliability based on the present sample. A 30-item version of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire was used in this study to measure the degree of mystical experience under the influence of psychedelic drugs. A shortened, 21-item version of the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale was used to evaluate non-clinical populations.

The DASS total was 0.93, depression was 0.90, anxiety was 0.80, stress was 0.85, and the PANAS was 0.89. The reliability of the scales was high. A brief, 10 item questionnaire evaluated two factors of life meaning: search for meaning, and presence of meaning. A 5 item scale measured general subjective satisfaction with one’s life, and a 20 item scale measured wisdom.

Degree of trait mindfulness predicts improvements to positive affect, negative affect, wisdom, mood disorder, and satisfaction with life, but not to DASS depression. Intensity of mystical experience predicts improvements to positive affect, presence of meaning, and life satisfaction.

Three linear regression models were fit and compared for increase of explained variance. Model 2 entered FFMQ as an additional predictor, and Model 3 entered MEQ as an additional predictor.

Fig 2 shows that mindfulness and mystical experience predict increased wellbeing. The slopes are extracted from model 3 of the hierarchical regression.

The five most common psychedelic drugs were analyzed by proportion of participants that reported using one or more psychedelic drugs.

Psychedelic users reported trying a variety of different substances, including cannabis, ayahuasca, ketamine, salvia divinorum, 2-CB, PCP, dextromethorphan, and a variety of grey-market psychedelic derivatives. The average LSD dose was heavy, the average mushroom dose was light, and the average MDMA dose was common.

Psychedelic moderated mystical experience predicts increased wellbeing, increased wisdom, and increased satisfaction with life. It also predicts decreased negative mood effects, and lower negative affect on the PANAS and MLQ scales.

Psychedelic use interacts with mindfulness to predict positive affect, but meditation practice does not. Wisdom, DASS total, PANAS negative subscale, SWLS, and both MLQ subscales were tested but yielded no significant interactions.

Two comparisons were run on both mindfulness and mystical experience total scores. The results showed that experienced participants in psychedelic use and meditation scored higher on mindfulness and mystical experience than naive participants.

Figure 4 shows that psychedelic users have higher FFMQ and MEQ scores than psychedelic naive participants, and that meditators have higher FFMQ and MEQ scores than non-meditators.

Results show that mindfulness and mystical experience predict global wellbeing, though mystical experience predicts increased negative mood disorder and negative affect.

Higher mindfulness predicts increased presence of meaning, yet less searching for meaning. This may be because individuals with higher mindfulness experience nondual states, which are characterized by the cessation of seeking, grasping, and self-referential processes.

Higher mindfulness predicts global wellbeing such as satisfaction with life and decreased mood disorder symptoms. Furthermore, this study suggests a positive relationship between mindfulness and wisdom.

Psychedelics increase positive affect, satisfaction with life, and presence of meaning, and mystical experience increases wisdom. People who microdose psychedelics score higher on wisdom than people who do not microdose. Mystical experience predicts increased negative affect, anxiety, and stress, but psychedelic use inversions this association. However, non-psychedelic related mystical experiences predict decreased mood, a novel finding. Psychedelic users and meditators have higher mindfulness and mystical experience than naive participants, and experienced meditators and psychedelic users have stronger mystical experiences than novice meditators.

The current study is unique in that it looks at both psychedelic use and mindfulness meditation practice to explicitly predict a broad array of wellbeing measures. However, the study is cross-sectional and correlational, and the sample was taken from two populations, online interest forums and an internal recruitment pool.

The present study sought to establish relationships between mindfulness, psychedelic experiences, and general wellbeing in non-clinical populations. The results suggest that mindfulness and psychedelic moderated mystical experiences have strong positive associations with multifaceted measures of wellbeing.