Time-course of psychedelic afterglow effects
Abstract
Interest in researching psychedelic substances has increased in recent years. Next to promising clinical effects, positive effects have also been found in non-clinical populations (Aday et al., 2020), regularly referred to as Afterglow effects (Pahnke, 1969). These include increased mood and reduced negative affect such as anxiety (Barrett et al., 2020; Forstmann et al., 2020; Galvao-Coelho et al., 2021), increased mindfulness (Murphy-Beiner et al., 2020; van Oorsouw, 2021), improved life-satisfaction and changed meaning in life (Griffiths et al., 2008, Kiraga et al., 2021; van Oorsouw, 2021), increased creativity (Kiraga et al., 2021; Mason et al., 2019), and reduced stress (van Oorsouw et al., 2021). Although many variables have been implied so far, their onset, duration and time-course are unknown. Smallwood & Schooler (2015) suggest that mind-wandering is not a random state of distraction, but actually an unconscious goal-directed behaviour, which seeks to take a break in order to improve mood, or to let thoughts wander in order to induce creativity and ascribe meaning to events. Interestingly, these effects have been implicated in the Afterglow as well. It is conceivable that the occurrence of Emotional Breakthroughs (Roseman et al., 2019), has to be processed in the form of Mind-wandering after a psychedelic experience, and may contribute to afterglow effects. This observational study attempts to describe the time-course of several variables that have been shown to change after consumption of psychedelics, in a convenience sample of recreational users in a naturalistic setting. Furthermore, this study attempts to investigate whether these effects may be predicted by Emotional Breakthroughs and changes in mind-wandering.
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