A Study on Psychedelics, Meditation and Wellbeing

Abstract

Recently there has been a large shift in public perception. Psychedelics have enjoyed a revival of sorts in academia and the popular culture. There are many promising claims of how psychedelics have the potential to occasion highly meaningful experiences under the right setting, as demonstrated in the landmark paper from John Hopkins University (R. R. Griffiths et al., 2006). In a similar vein, mindfulness and adjacent contemplative practices have also risen dramatically in popularity both within the scientific community and in society at large. Many contemplative practices also claim similar benefits to meaning, affect and spirituality (Garland et al., 2017). Both practices exhibit overlapping claims to increases of wellbeing measures such as life meaning, positive affect, satisfaction and spirituality (Jungaberle et al., 2018). Anecdotally for many people, contemplative practices in tandem with psychedelics are invaluable tools for benefits to psychological wellbeing and a good life. The intersection of these two growing fields of study is seldom examined. Recently, there are early scientific reports of interaction effects between psychedelics and contemplation and their relation to psychological health (Aday et al., 2020; Roland R. Griffiths et al., 2018; Millière et al., 2018; Smigielski et al., 2019). These evidence suggest an interesting effect worth observing at the overlap of the two practices. Due to legal and bureaucratic limitations at the current time, robust blinded clinical studies are difficult to initiate. We employ a cross-sectional, survey based approach. In this way, we can acquire a large representative sample which is more than sufficient for preliminary analysis. Due to the novelty of the field, exploratory data is important for informing future research on possible effects within this domain of study.

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