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You are listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Ayelet Waldman. Ayelet is the mother of four children, and was a federal public defender and adjunct professor at UC Berkeley Law School where she developed and taught a course on the legal implications of the war on drugs. She is the best-selling author and editor of a number of books, novels, and essay collections including the book, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. She’s also the author of Love and Treasure, and Inside This Place, Not Of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons, and has been called “America’s Most Outrageous Writer” for her frank books and essays on motherhood.
I have such a great appreciation for Ayelet’s tremendous authenticity and bravery to speak from her own experience, and also her advocacy that we have the right to take charge of all of the different medicines and tools that are available to help us find balance and health in our lives. Here’s my conversation with the very talented and funny Ayelet Waldman.
Ayelet, your book, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life came to the attention of our editorial team here at Sounds True, and someone said, “Tami, you have to talk to Ayelet about microdosing. You have to.” So let’s do it, all right?
Ayelet Waldman: Awesome, let’s talk about microdosing.
TS: How did microdosing first come to your attention?
AW: I used to work, I was a public defender before I was a novelist and an essayist. When I left the Public Defender’s office, I became a law professor and I taught all sorts of things, criminal law, constitutional criminal procedure, but I created a seminar at the University of California’s law school called The Legal and Social Implications of the War on Drugs. It’s very easy, I tell you the title, you know what the class is about. When you teach subjects like that people send you books, lots of books. A book came across my desk, it was called The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, and I did not open it because I am not a psychedelic explorer. I had no interest in psychedelics, I didn’t trip like my husband did, for example, or many of my friends.
I always sort of felt like the inside of my head was a terrifying place and I didn’t really want to have any heightened insight into it. I didn’t look at it. And then for some reason that I cannot explain I decided one day to leaf through it when I was in a particularly dark place in my life in terms of my mood, and I came upon this chapter on microdosing in Jim Fadiman’s Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. And I immediately sparked to it. I knew a lot about the research that was being done with large doses of psychedelic drugs, psilocybin particularly in the United States, LSD in other countries, that seem to show real, very exciting outcomes when used as a treatment modality for depression and anxiety.
I had never heard of microdosing until I read about it. Then I went online and I watched Jim Fadiman give some interviews on “the YouTubes” and he described this experience that one of the women he talked to had on microdosing. She’s talking about how she didn’t trip, nothing psychedelic happened, but at the end of the day she sort of looked back on her day and she said, “Huh! That was a really good day.” And that just stopped me in my tracks because at the time I had not had a really good day in months. I had been so depressed, suicidally depressed. All but anhedonic.
The idea of having a reliably good day was . . . I can’t even describe how much I wanted it. That sent me down this rabbit hole of trying to decide . . . I’m a middle-aged mom of four. I’m a lawyer. Do I break the law? Do I try this? Is there a way to get it legally? (Short answer, no.) Ultimately I decided to do an illegal, 30-day experiment microdosing with LSD.
TS: Now, microdosing dosing means, from reading your book, that it’s approximately one tenth of what a typical dose would be.
AW: Right, so it’s hard to say what a typical dose is, really. Because it’s an illegal drug, people take all sorts of different quantities. Your average 12-time Burning Man visitor is going to take more than a middle school student in the city of Berkeley, I would hope. Actually, I really would hope that the middle school student in the city of Berkeley would just not take any psychedelics at all until they were grown up enough to handle the ramifications, but anyway. If you say that a typical dose is around 100, and it is somewhere between 100 and 200 micrograms, not milligrams, micrograms, a microdose would be about 10 micrograms.
TS: OK, and just in setting the stage here, describe Jim Fadiman’s 30-day protocol, how it works.
AW: Jim came up with this protocol as a way to . . . Because no research was allowed, or being done on microdosing, he really wanted to understand whether there were any real effects. And he wanted to give people a kind of structure in which to evaluate the possible benefits of the microdosing of psychedelics. He set up this 30-day system where on day one you take the microdose early in the morning, because it’s very activating and if you take it late in the day you won’t sleep all night. And then you experience the effects of it. On day two, peculiarly, because this does not make sense if you consider the half-life of the drug, but on day two you continue to experience positive (and in my case, in many people’s case, even more positive) effects. Then on day three is your reset to normal, like where you are.
For me, day three, I didn’t reset to the kind of suicidal state that I had been in before, that really ended with the first dose. But I would sort of . . . The best way I could describe it is on day three I would be like, “Oh, it’s you…” For a person with a mood disorder, it often feels like you have kind of two states of being existing, maybe even three: the depressed state of being, the manic state of being or hypo-manic state of being, and then the you that is you, the normal you, for a lack of a better word. I felt like on day three the depressed state of being would kind of raise its ugly head, and I would recognize it right away and be sad to see it. But then on day four, it all starts again, and you take your dose and you have those two days and then there’s a reset and all that.
The reset exists so that you can evaluate the results, and it also exists because there are some people, and again we don’t have good research on this, but there are some people who believe that a tolerance to psychedelic drugs can build up, and that this is a way to avoid the possibility of tolerance. Jim is not a believer in the whole idea of tolerance building in the system. I’m not sure what I believe. What I believe is we need more research. I’d like to see a lot more research, on that specific issue and others.
TS: Now, you said something that really got my attention. That the suicidal urges that you felt before you started this 30-day experiment with microdosing went away with your very first dose. That’s big. That’s big.
AW: It’s massive, I mean it really is massive. Now, I want to say one thing really clearly. Because we don’t know, because there hasn’t been research, what I could have experienced is the mother of all placebo effects. Right? It wasn’t very strong.
TS: I don’t care. I still think it’s big.
AW: Right, but it’s public now, right? So I took this drug and it wasn’t like I suddenly became a happy, content, fulfilled human being. But I stopped wanting to kill myself on the day that I took the microdose. And I did not want to kill myself again throughout the period that I was dosing and for quite a while after that, I have to say.
TS: OK, quite a while after that, it sounds like it maybe wasn’t an enduring effect.
AW: It doesn’t endure unless you continue to take the drug, and I haven’t been comfortable taking the drug because it’s illegal. I feel like as soon as I made the decision to go public I lost the ability to do this secret, illegal experiment. If I’m going to go public with it . . . Donald Trump is President and Jeff Sessions was Attorney General and the last thing I need is to be committing a federal crime. It’s an irresponsible thing. You have children.
TS: Sure.
AW: There are probably federal crimes I’d be happy to commit like marching and trespassing and God only knows what, but right now under these circumstances I am too afraid to commit crimes like this.
TS: No, I appreciate that. I think what’s curious to me is what creates lasting transformation in any human being’s life. And that’s a lot here at Sounds True that we focus on. What are the tools? What are the aids? Just to be quite up front with you, in my own life experience I focused a lot on inner technologies of meditation, prayer, that kind of thing. And through doing this interview series now, Insights At The Edge, for more than 500 episodes, I started hearing that we’re in a psychedelic renaissance and I started talking to people, and they’re like, “Tami, open your mind. This stuff is powerful. It helps. Your job, if your job is really to help people transform, then you need to include psychedelics in the tool box.”
So I’ve been attempting, more and more, to open and see. So in talking to you and asking these questions about, “What are the transformative effects?” I’m moved by the fact that in a way it worked, but it didn’t really work is what you’re telling me, unless you continued with it.
AW: So this is what I’m telling you, I think when you take large doses of psychedelics there is research, good solid research that shows that the effects sustain. But for example, someone who is profoundly anxious and depressed because they are confronting the end of their life, they have a fatal disease, they have transformative, spiritual experiences under the influence of large doses of psilocybin or LSD or whatever drug they use, that allows them to contemplate death with less fear, to understand and to appreciate their place in the universe, and to experience, for lack of a better phrase, a really good death. I think that’s really clear.
I think there is really good evidence that having a psychedelic trip can be transformative in terms of addiction. Specifically to cigarettes and alcohol, maybe even to opioids. We’re just discovering that now. I think there is evidence about PTSD, about depression. There is no good evidence yet about microdosing. Unlike large doses, in my experience, because I can only speak anecdotally, in my experience microdosing would be something that you have to do, like you take an anti-depressant. You would have to sustain the practice in order to experience the benefits.
In my case it was a really long time before I found myself in dire straits. I’m going to be completely honest with you, Tami, in a way that I didn’t expect to be. It’s only very recently that I experienced a resurgence of those feelings. It’s situational in large part. Donald Trump is President, our country seems to be in a dying democracy, my children are experiencing various challenges, I’ve had a professional setback or two. All of those things are true, and more importantly I think for my personal experience I was put on a course of Progesterone after an ambiguous uterine . . . whatever.
I had to take Progesterone, which has marked depressive effects. I have now, because of those various situational things, and because of the Progesterone, I am once again experiencing the same kind of depression that led me to microdosing. But it’s been years. Really, years, and I’m just having this experience again. Anybody can tell you, who deals with mood disorders and depression, to have relative stability for years is remarkable.
TS: Well there are two things. One, I just kind of want to give you a hug, to be honest.
AW: Thanks.
TS: Yes.
AW: Yes, it’s not like a—
TS: No, I know, but—
AW: When I agreed to do the podcast I didn’t know that I would be struggling like I am now.
TS: That’s OK, and I really appreciate your authenticity. I think that’s the core of what the term “Sounds True” means to me, is how our authenticity leads us where we need to go, so I really appreciate that. It sounds to me that if microdosing were legal, you’d be doing it right now!
AW: Oh my God, there is no doubt, and this is what’s so heartbreaking about this, right? For me, but also for my family. Knowing that there is a way out, but it’s a way out that’s blocked to me is really hard. It’s really emotionally challenging. There’s some countries that have been experimenting with legalization of psychedelics. If Oregon actually passes its psilocybin legalization bill, I think we may be renting a little studio apartment for me in Oregon every three days.
TS: Now, tell me more about the 30-day experiment and how it affected you while you were doing it. You were writing every day as well. How did the writing impact your experience?
AW: It’s so interesting, I wasn’t in it for the productivity enhancement, that’s why a lot of, specifically the people in Silicon Valley are interested in this, many of them, because it makes them better, stronger, faster. I think there is also a big spiritual seeking element, but for a lot of people it’s all about, “Is this an alternative to Adderall that’s less damaging on the brain and body? Is this better than Adderall?” I didn’t care about that at all. Even though I’m an artist, I’ve never experienced any negative effects from anti-depressants or other drugs on my creativity and I had not experienced really any positive effects, although I had once tried my son’s Ritalin and found it to be remarkable at achieving a kind of insane focus followed by blinding headaches and shitty moods.
Even though I wasn’t looking for it, I definitely found it. There is that creative things they call “flow” when you are in this state of creative productivity, when the ideas are coming, when you feel like your whole brain and body are moving towards a state of creative bliss, you don’t even notice time passing. I’ve had the experience of someone saying, “I was knocking on your studio door for hours. I could see you inside, but it was like you weren’t hearing the door.” That was much more . . . That’s a miracle when it happens, it happens very rarely under the most perfect of circumstances, but it happened fairly reliably during that experimental period and that’s incredible. First of all, it makes you happy. It’s a mood enhancer. To have that period of flow is in and of itself a mood enhancing experience.
But it was a real true thing, and in many ways the book is the book that microdosing wrote. Psychedelic drugs, nobody knows how they work really, but they seem to allow different parts of your brain that don’t normally communicate to communicate in novel ways and interesting ways. This book has a lot of different strands. It’s all about the experiment, right? It’s all about neurochemistry, it’s about the effect of psychedelics on the brain, it’s about depression, it’s about mental illness, it’s about my marriage and what it’s like to be married to a person with a mental illness, what it’s like to have a mother with a mental illness. It’s about all those things, and the history because I taught this class for so long. I also brought in a lot about the history of the war on drugs and the American relationship with drugs. The history of the psychedelic movement, mass incarceration and its relationship to the war on drugs.
It’s all these strands that if I had pitched this to my editor she would have said to me, “That is not one book. That is not going to work.” But it works. I hate to toot my own horn, but I think it actually works really well and in a way it is the proof of the psychedelic experience, that under the influence of that very tiny amount I was able to come up with this creative structure that I don’t think I would have been able to come up with before.
TS: I think it is a beautiful and brilliant book. The way it all weaves together, and it’s a really fun read as well. Now you said microdosing wrote the book, how does your other writing compare to A Really Good Day, with a microdosing-written book?
AW: The book is very me, it has my sense of humor, it’s all about all these different things I’m interested in. During the writing of this book I had this experience of writing about the law for non-lawyers. Writing about the war on drugs for people who had never thought about it before. And that was incredibly exciting because I realized doing that, that I want to do more of that. I’ve always thought of myself as a novelist, as a television writer, as perhaps a essayist, but I had never really thought about myself as someone who could write for . . . Who could translate these esoteric and complicated subjects for other people. It’s given me a whole different line of inquiry in my future work, which is really exciting.
So right now I put aside the novel that I’ve been working on, and I am looking for a way to do more of this specific thing. What is something in the world that people should understand but they don’t and that I can help perhaps illuminate?
TS: OK, but do you think there is something about your creative process while microdosing that was enhanced in some way, where there was more associative thinking or weaving together things that might not have seemed associated?
AW: Yes, sure. I definitely think it was not unlike me, but it was like me at my best, my most creative. It didn’t change the range, but it pushed me in the higher end of the range, more elaborate. So at my creative best, I am very quick, I make associations, I draw analogies, I understand things very rapidly, I make unusual connections. Taking the drugs seemed to allow me to sit in that space just more often and more reliably. That’s me at my best.
Frequently I sit down at my desk, and I’m just like, “Well this is a nightmare. What is this piece of shit I’m working on? I don’t even understand it.” Or have the experience of feeling like I can’t do something. Can’t do it. Can’t do it. Can’t do it. And then after the book is published feeling like, “I don’t know how I did it.” And never having a memory of residing in the space of, “I can do this, and I’m doing it.” It’s just like, “I can’t do it. How did I do that?”
TS: Well all of this is, of course I think making the listener and certainly making me want to do a microdosing experiment because, of course, people want to be more creative. I could understand way Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are microdosing left, right and center, or so I’ve heard. They want to-
AW: And megadosing.
TS: Yes. Micro- and mega- dosing. That makes sense. Do you think it’s an effective, as they call it, productivity hack?
AW: Yes, I think it is an effective productivity hack. Does that mean you should spend all your time tripping balls? No. I think that we need to understand the long-term consequences on the brain and body of psychedelic drugs. By the way, I would argue that we need to understand the long-term consequences on the brain and body of SSRIs. We don’t know anywhere near enough about what it does to the human brain to spend decades taking Prozac. We got FDA approval after a very limited period of experimentation and we really . . . I really want to know more about microdosing. What does being exposed to a tiny Serotonin charge every three days do to the brain? What does it do to the other places where there’s Serotonin receptors? What does it do to the heart? What does it do to the gut? Maybe nothing. Maybe something.
So I actually think I don’t think people should take Adderall because it will make you sit down for eight hours and write your paper. I’m uncomfortable with those kinds of productivity hacks because they tend to come from a place of ignorance. You either haven’t thought through or you don’t know the long-term consequences of what you’re doing. And similarly, I’m uncomfortable saying, “Everybody should microdose.” Because I don’t, really. I want more information, but for someone who is experiencing . . . Two of my kids have ADHD, and have been prescribed ADHD medication. Adderall. Adderall is methamphetamine. It’s a drug. There is a tiny metabolic . . . What’s the word I’m looking for? I’m over 50. See, if were on LSD I probably would not lose this word.
There is a tiny difference in metabolic structure, but they’re very, very, they’re almost identical drugs. So basically, my kids are on meth, right? Adderall, but let’s be real. They hate it. They despise the drug. Neither of them can stand taking it. They get depressed every day that they have to take it, and they both take it the bare minimum. So they’ll take it for an important test or a paper when their attention deficits are just defeating them at all turns.
What if they lived in a world where we did real research on microdosing with psychedelics? And instead of taking a drug that they despise, that makes them feel crappy, that makes them angry and irritable, that makes them feel not like themselves, they could take a tiny microdose of something that didn’t have any of those side effects? That maybe has a little bit of an enhanced irritability, but nothing like Adderall.
That would give them that kind of creative space and push, that little jolt. That would be incredible. I’ll never do it, I would never give them a psychedelic, because it’s illegal, and because I think the risks are so high in this world of committing these kinds of crimes. While we still have such a crazy, puritan approach to drug use, but I would love to see research so that maybe . . . Think of how much pain we could save the people who currently are so unhappy and in so much pain because of their Adderall use.
TS: Now if you could wave your magic wand (I’m giving you one right now) and the next series of research experiments could happen on microdosing, what do you think would be the most helpful research experiments to happen right away?
AW: Double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. What’s the average study? I get to wave my magic wand, right? So I can have completely insane . . . The study could be like nobody else’s study has ever been. I would like to see 1000 people divided into ranges of ailments. 100 depressed people. 100 anxious people. 100 people with PTSD, whatever they are, and 1000 similarly-situated people, a placebo-controlled study, where everything was placebo controlled. You know none of it. The researchers didn’t know, nobody knew, and a very carefully constructed system of metrics so that you could really see what kind of benefits were being alleged and you could also test them. I would like to see, let’s do some brain study there too. Let’s put people on MRI machines and see what it’s like when they’re microdosing.
There is so much that I want. All of it costs so much money. You know what there is zero incentive from the private sector for? Studying psychedelics. Why? Because they grow on frogs or mushrooms or with LSD they’re synthesized, but you know, you can’t patent it because it’s already gone through that process, so there is no incentive from a pharmaceutical company to do the research necessary to market the drugs.
TS: Well, maybe not from a pharmaceutical company, but look what a big business. I live here in the state of Colorado, and marijuana is a huge business in this state. There is a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities.
AW: Yes, true. But that doesn’t lead to research, right? That leads to kind of what we have with marijuana now, which is fine, I’m all for legalization. I think there is interesting opportunities for research. The capitalist cart is being put before the investigative horse, I think, on marijuana. Which is not to say that I don’t support wholeheartedly decriminalization, but I just want research, I want research, I want research. There is just not as much incentive without . . . If we lived in a normal world, we wouldn’t be relying on multi-national corporations to decide what illnesses could be cured by what drugs. I mean, it’s insane.
TS: Now, you mentioned that you’re the mother of four children. Did they know that you were going through this 30-day microdosing experiment?
AW: They knew that I was trying a new drug. When you have a parent with a mental illness, that’s a very familiar experience for you. “Mom is trying a new medication,” is something they’d heard many times before.
TS: OK.
AW: They didn’t know that I was doing a psychedelic drug until I decided to write about it. And then I had to tell them. It actually led to this lunatic moment in our house where I was like, I never get up in the morning. I’m not a morning person, but I was up early, I was all vibrant and chatty, and I was braiding my daughter’s hair, being all cute, and she was just like, “Uh, my God. What is wrong with you? Are you on acid?”
And I was just like, “Why do you ask?” But she had seen me so depressed for so long that me in a good mood felt to her like some kind of bodysnatcher moment. Who was this terrifying, happy creature that had taken over her mother’s irritable, grim, and despairing body?
TS: And what is your view of talking to children? At what age and about psychedelic substances, with what kinds of boundaries and parameters and suggestions?
AW: I have a harm reduction approach to all drugs in terms of my children. Actually have a harm reduction from everything when it comes to my kids. When my kids leave the house I don’t say, “Drive carefully.” I say, “Use a condom and test your Molly.” I believe that I know what I was like as a kid, I now have four children. My youngest is 15, my oldest is in her mid 20s. I know what kids get up to and I don’t want one of my kids to die. Because that’s what we’re talking about, because I have been afraid that if I give them information, I will encourage behavior. I think that what you give, when you give information, are tools to make valid decisions. You don’t encourage behavior simply by giving people information.
We have negotiated, in our house, different rules about different drugs. It’s purely what we’re comfortable with. For example, in our house I think that people should not smoke marijuana until they’re out of their adolescence. Until their frontal cortex is fully developed. That is a losing argument.
TS: Which is what age?
AW: Mid 20s. So that’s never going to happen, right? Kids in Berkeley start smoking weed in elementary school.
TS: Wow.
AW: That is not acceptable to me. We reached a negotiated agreement with our oldest kids that if they kept their grades up, if they remained careful, contented members of our family community, if they carried out their obligations, then they could start smoking marijuana at age 15, on the weekends, in safe circumstances. I hate that agreement. I think 15 is way too young. I wished it was 18, but they wished it was 11, you know, so we compromised. That’s what you do in these circumstances. A compromise, by necessity, means that everybody is miserable. But you get to the point where you can tolerate. That’s our family. I’m not saying everybody should do that, but that’s our family’s approach to marijuana.
We have a zero tolerance approach to alcohol. I think alcohol is devastating. And I don’t want my kids drinking, so I’ll be the first one to say to them, “Just smoke a goddamn joint. Do not drink that. Don’t get hammered, don’t pre-game before that party. You want to alter your consciousness? Smoke some weed.” Again, that may be totally different. We’re Jews. We don’t drink. My parents have had the same bottle of Apple Top Brandy in their cabinet, and when I was 45 I said, “Listen, Mom, that’s been half water since I was 15. You might want to throw that bottle out.” Alcohol is a big deal for us.
On psychedelics, my message to my children has been, “These are really, really, powerful drugs. These are drugs that bring you to an experience that can be life altering or absolutely traumatizing. When you are young, you do not have the tools to assimilate that experience and you need to wait until you are mature enough to assimilate that experience if it’s bad, and understand it and survive it, and also if it’s good.” Like you need to know what to do with all of those personal insights, and when you’re 15 you don’t.
The other thing I tell them specifically about MDMA, which I think is a remarkable drug. MDMA is astonishing, it’s a gift to humanity, but it is a gift that gets less effective with every use, and there is no time like the first time. So if you want to preserve that experience, you need to save that until you’re in a committed relationship. The first time you do Molly is more important from a relationship point of view than the first time you have sex. Save it for someone you love. Save it for that incredible intimate connection. It will transform that relationship, it will deepen it in a way that you can only imagine. Don’t just pop some Molly at a party and dance with a bunch of complete strangers. What a waste! But, because I’m not crazy and I know that my children are not going to listen to me, no matter how I wax rhapsodic about the benefits of MDMA on the capacity of human beings for love, I also give them tools.
I tell them what is out there right now that they’re calling MDMA or Molly is not MDMA. What is out there is some combination of synthetic cannabinoids from China, Fentanyl, methamphetamine, garbage from the inside of someone’s pocket liner. Who knows what’s in there. They can be incredibly dangerous. A bunch of students at Wesleyan University when my daughter was there took what they thought was MDMA, it was a synthetic cannabinoid. They ended up in the ER, one of them had to be intubated. You have to test your drugs. Don’t do it! But if you’re going to do it, there’s a bunch of testing kits in the bathroom. I didn’t count them, but if anybody, you, your friends, wants to take one of these drugs, you go, you get a testing kit and you make sure that what you’re taking is what you think you’re taking.
TS: Now, in talking about MDMA, one of the parts of A Really Good Day that I enjoyed quite a lot was your discussion of how you and your husband have used MDMA as a type of, you called it marital therapy, that it helped you renew. Tell me more about that, and if you think it actually could be useful to couples in that way.
AW: This is the first use of it, right? When Sasha Shulgin synthesized MDMA—it wasn’t the first time the drug had been synthesized, it had been a pre-cursor chemical that had been used in industry, but he was probably the first person who bioassayed it, meaning he’s the first person who knocked it back. He did it—this wonderful Berkeley chemist, a kind of backyard chemist, but very well educated—he did it on the Reno Fun Train from San Francisco to Reno, because everybody he knew was drinking and Sasha didn’t like to drink and he wanted an alternative to alcohol. Wow, did he get one. But his wife was, Ann was a lay couple’s therapist and they had a very good friend who was a couple’s therapist and a psychologist. And they immediately realized, as Ann’s children have said, I used to bring Sasha and Ann in to talk to my law students, that she could achieve, in a single six-hour MDMA session with a couple what would take years and years of therapy.
MDMA acts on memory and what it does is, in my experience, it dissociates memory from the trauma of memory. It’s effective for PTSD because you can say, “Experience the traumatic war experience that has led to your PTSD, but without the feelings, the negative feelings. The feelings of terror, anxiety, fear.” Instead with this kind of rush of positivity, not about the experience per se, but you have that in your . . . Your body is feeling that sense of bliss and joy and it allows you to unpack those traumatic memories and reassimilate them. In terms of couples, the best way for me to describe it, which isn’t very scientific at all, is that it flings you back into that first blush of infatuation. When you just are crazy about the person, and everything about them. From the shape of their foot to the way they drink their soup to the quality of their conversation. It just exhilarates you both body and soul. But, with all of the experience and familiarity of your deep knowledge of one another, so you can talk about difficulties from a place of love and utter lack of defensiveness. You can talk about things that make you happy from a place of openness and lack of fear.
It’s just transformative for a relationship. This is how transformative. When we did it together for the first time, we both got on the phone with our parents who are in difficult relationships and begged them to do it. We became evangelists for this experience because it was so remarkably positive for our relationship.
TS: And again, because I’m interested in not just state changes, but lasting changes, how would you say it’s impacted your marriage in an ongoing way?
AW: We’ve been married for 25 years, it is one of the important elements in the success of our marriage. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been so happily married for so long, I do not doubt.
TS: Tell me again, maybe in a different way, of how the MDMA experience led to a deeper understanding or appreciation of each other. Because that’s part of what I got from reading your book, was this deep sense of how you and your husband love each other, basically.
AW: We would spend six hours talking about how and why and with what qualities we loved one another. We would . . . For us, it was not about sex. Not physical. We would talk for hours about the love we felt. We would describe one another’s personality to each other in the most loving terms. We would take apart challenges from this place of complete soul commitment, knowing that getting to the hard stuff was only going to make us love each other more. People talk like this and I just want to roll my eyes, because they sound like such a bunch of ninnies. “Soul connection.” I don’t use that language, I’m a hard-boiled New Jersey Jew. We’re not big on spiritual experiences. Our spiritual experience is getting out of services as quickly as possible. But I think that experience is . . . That’s the closest I have come to a spiritual experience. It’s one of the things when I think about . . . The microdosing made me really rethink my relationship with spirituality. It’s not like I’m out there being a spiritual person now, but I’ve always been very, even intolerant of spirituality, and dismissive.
I had this insight when I was microdosing, that a belief in the unknown and the ephemeral might seem to be naïve to me, to be misguided to me. But the thing I believe more than anything in the world is completely ephemeral, and that is the love I feel for my husband. There is no way to quantify that. There is no way to . . . You can’t measure, you can’t analyze, you can’t dissect love. Why do I love him and not someone else? It is an absolutely spiritual experience to love this person and this moment with all your heart.
TS: Now because I’m very invested in the spiritual journey and that experience and appreciation, in awe, I would say, in the face of the unknown, I’m curious to know how your 30-day microdosing opened you to an appreciation of spirituality maybe different than running out of the Synagogue on Friday night?
AW: It really did. I began saying to myself, “You believe in this one profound thing that you cannot touch. Then why are you so adamant that this other thing that seems illogical, that you cannot touch, why are you so sure that doesn’t exist?” So it’s not like I now believe in God or a higher power, or spiritual path. But I have become, I would say, an Agnostic, from a place of deep Atheism. That’s pretty freaking transformative after 30 days of a tiny dose of a drug, I got to tell you.
TS: Would you say there were any negative affects during the 30 days?
AW: Yes. It made me a little more irritable on day one. What I eventually realized is that if I tempered it with a little pure CBD . . . I really do not like THC, marijuana, that part of cannabis, but if I tempered it with a little bit of CBD, that would smooth out the irritability and I would be fine, but that was a side effect I noticed. Sometimes there might be a tiny bit of stomach upset, but those were the only things that I noticed.
TS: And did you notice any negative side effects when you were using MDMA with your husband as part of your renegotiating your vows, if you will. Not exactly that . . .
AW: The comedown from MDMA can be really intense and once we had a horrible fight after taking MDMA. Which is really a bummer because we had had this wonderful experience. And it was just like a pure Serotonin thing, and so what we started doing is taking, as the MDMA ebbed, we would take a small dose of an SSRI as a way to kind of keep ourselves from going into a Serotonin trough, and that seemed a really effective way to eliminate the post-MDMA blues.
TS: It feels to me, that one of the things you’re pointing to, that you’ve been implying in this conversation, is that if we had a lot more information about all of these different effects, we could really manage our own psychopharmacology so much more intelligently.
AW: Exactly. I mean that’s really the most important message of my book and of my life. I believe that human beings are entitled to, as you say, manage their psychopharmacology. I believe that’s a fundamental right, to know and to take control of your own brain and your own emotional state, but I also believe that we as a society have shied away from research on all things for lots of motivations. We have a corporate motivation, because of capitalism, that makes us do the bare minimum of research to get the drug approved.
That shouldn’t be our policy. We’ve criminalized these various drugs in ways that make them impossible to study. Why is that the answer? You have a suspicion that a drug might be harmful, why is the answer to ban it and never look at it again? The answer, surely, must be that what you need to do is to study it, hard.
TS: It seems very logical as you say it.
AW: The ultimate irony of this experience has been that I have found that individuals who are in favor of reforming the laws about psychedelics and other drugs are far more reasonable and rational than those opposed. You would think the acid freaks would be the crazy ones, but it turns out that the ones who reject research and study and sensible, prudent courses of action are the ones screaming, “No, no, no. This is bad.”
TS: When I asked you if you had a magic wand, the type of research you’d like to see with microdosing, I loved your answer. And when I think of MDMA and marital therapy I think, “God, that’s one of those areas…” I’ve interviewed a lot of authors and therapists who work with couples. I know how hard it is to get couples to change and grow and the divorce rate, etc. What would be, if you had a magic wand, how we would research MDMA as a tool for marriages?
AW: Where there is great research being done at the University of South Carolina right now. They’re doing, specifically PTSD research. But the researchers had an insight that PTSD was, in many ways, the disease of a relationship, not just a disease of an individual, and they just received permission, for the first time, to give MDMA to the
non-affected spouse. What’s revolutionary about is, if you think about it, they’re giving a drug to the non-affected spouse. So they’re studying a disease, PTSD, and a therapy, MDMA, and they’re saying, “We’re not going to give the therapy to the person with the disease, we’re going to give it to their partner.” It’s incredible that permission was granted. And the results are, I think, going to be really exciting. I would like to see more of that. I think PTSD, couples experiencing, where one is experiencing PTSD, is a great place to start.
You take couples in the most horrible kind of extremis and you see whether one or two guided MDMA sessions with a therapist, with follow-up and preparation, can have a more dramatic result in terms of both the symptoms of PTSD and the quality of the relationship going forward. I’d like to see a lot more of that and then we can expand beyond couples in extremis to just the normal day-to-day tribulations of marriage. Marriage is hard, man. It’s a really hard thing we decided to do. Mostly monogamous for most of us, decades upon decades of living together.
TS: I want to circle back to something that a little tender and I’m going to say a little bit about myself in this. You were talking about Progesterone and how one of the known impacts of Progesterone is depression. And without even knowing that and what kind of emotional state or mood I might find you in today, just in reading your book, A Really Good Day, one of the things that you wrote about had to do with your experience with different hormonal imbalances in your life and the role of hormones in your state of being.
AW: I wouldn’t even call them hormonal imbalances. I would say that my experience of the typical, standard hormone fluctuations that are of a healthy woman’s body. I, like many other people, experience, have a side effect of those healthy fluctuations, which is dramatic mood cycling.
TS: OK, thank you for clarifying that. One of the things that occurred to me is how many people will go to a therapist, or go and work with a spiritual teacher, and they’ll be presenting some issue in their life that they’re struggling with, when they’re not looking at all at their psychopharmacology, they’re not looking at their blood chemistry, they’re not looking at how that might be a factor. And how they’re psychologizing or spiritualizing something that’s really happening at a much more biological level that’s being uninvestigated. So that’s what I’m curious to know what your thoughts are about that.
AW: I think that’s an incredibly important concept, idea, insight. And I think it can be expanded too. I think so often, what is it about the human brain? Is it because we look for an easy answer? That we so often focus on one thing when there are other elements swimming around that could be as or even more important. Could be having as or as much of an impact. I think the biggest insight I had into my own mood disorder was when I realized that what I was, was reactive. I was reactive to drugs. I was reactive to my hormones. I was reactive to my situation. What made me atypical was the labile nature of those reactions. That they were more intense than other people. That’s what my mood disorder really was. It wasn’t so much a mood disorder, it was a kind of hyperreactivity to both positive and negative signals. And whether that’s hormonal, whether it had to do with the sun, whether it had to do with a bad situation with my family, in my relationship, that I was always going to be more reactive than other people.
What I needed to do in thinking about medication, was think about a medication that could somehow manage that reactivity. No doctor ever said that to me. Every doctor said to me, “Oh, this is your problem.” And pointed to one thing. “Oh, your problem is that you have a genetic predisposition to bi-polar disorder.” And that is about the Serotonin problem. Or, “Your problem is hormonal.” Everybody tries to pocket it, whereas to come up with a kind of overarching concept that encompasses all of the different elements seems to be beyond the . . . Not beyond the capacity, but maybe it’s beyond the expectations of most physicians, therapists and clinicians. It’s like a massive exaggeration of the old saying, to hammer everything with a nail.
But what we really need are people to stand away from things. Or to develop in ourselves actually (even more important that having others, therapists or whatever) but to develop in ourselves the capacity to look at all these symptoms and try to understand, not just for one underling element, but rather understand, “What is this systemic thing that’s happening and what is the best systemic, comprehensive way to deal with it?”
TS: In terms of this tendency to be reactive, I thought it was interesting that in the afterword of the book you’re writing about, in retrospect, what you think the net result of your 30-day microdosing experiment might be. You say that it allowed there to be a little space in your mind to consider how to act in accordance with your values and not just react to external stimuli. I thought, “Well that’s really interesting. That’s what came from her 30-day microdosing.” I think a lot of people would say that that’s what comes from a meditation practice, or a mindfulness practice.
AW: I know. I don’t know what it is that keeps me from developing a mindfulness practice. I know how good it would be for me. I know that this is one of the clearest things that people experience as a result of having a real, regular meditation practice. But for whatever reason, and I just won’t say that I haven’t yet been able to compel myself to do that with regularity. I wish I could, I wish I did. Maybe it will happen starting tomorrow, or today. I don’t know. If you have any secret tips I would be really open to hearing them.
TS: I would say my secret tip is whatever you’re experiencing that you don’t like, use that as your object of meditation. Go right into it.
AW: Oh my God. So let myself think, ruminate on the shitty things.
TS: Feel it. Feel it. Go right into it at a feeling level.
AW: That’s all I want to do! Oh my God, see, that’s the opposite of what I thought I had to do with meditation. I’m going to close my eyes and talk about crap and [inaudible], so think about it. In fact, we should just end this conversation so that I can start doing that right now.
TS: We’re going to. Your next book, Ayelet, might be How A Really Bad Day Brought Me To New Insights About My Mood, Marriage, and Life. Hey, to be honest with you, I really enjoyed speaking with you and I think you’ve helped, really helped-
AW: Me too, I wish you lived closer, you seem like you could be a friend. Although I bet that’s what everybody tells you.
TS: No, it’s not true. But I think you’re really advocating for something in the world that I think is important, when it comes to the kind of research we can do, and the way that we can take back charge of our own access to the tools and medicine that will help us as human beings. So, thank you so much.
AW: Thank you, it was a real pleasure talking to you too.
TS: Bye-bye.
AW: Bye-bye.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Ayelet Waldman. She is the author of the book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made A Mega Difference In My Mood, My Marriage, And My Life. Thank you so much for being with us. SoundsTrue.com, waking up the world.
