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Does LSD's Novelty Effect Ever Wear Off?

A

Anyo

Greenlighter
Joined
Feb 7, 2013
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14
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I've been looking into the safety margin for LSD lately and it sounds a bit too good to be true. If it really is that good, I think I've finally found the cure to my life long struggle with social anxiety. I figure I would take a hit every 2 weeks, or 1 week maximum. 8)

Considering adherence to a twice-a-month routine, does the novelty effect of LSD ever wear off over the years? I'm speaking specifically of:

1) The laughter from seeing the simplicity of life during the trip
2) The afterglow- where you experience the world as it really is instead of taking the back seat to it. You can fully taste the tastes and smell the scents like it's your first time alive.
3) The distance it creates between you and your thoughts- you no longer get swept up by the tide of the mind as easily. Thoughts are simply thoughts, nothing more. They don't have as much power to alter your perception of reality. You stand firmly planted in the present moment with a good handle on reality.
4) General euphoria during and after tripping

Thanks for reading, guys ;)
 
Yes! Provided you're mentally stable, LSD has a fantastic safety profile and it's a great drug because of that.

I was taking LSD about twice a month for a few months in 2011, and it was great every time- but I should note that I tripped with a different group of people each time, so there was that external novelty to keep me going. IMHO, if you dose twice a month, with the same people or by yourself each time, the experience will not be as interesting after a while.

Of course, I've never tripped that frequently for that long, so I can't really say for sure.
 
op you should read 'be here now' by baba ram dass

tolerance to lsd builds really quickly. its a big dispute whether one can effectively trip 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. days in a row. im on the side that you can get effects from tripping days in succession though the effects seem to meld into one big long blurrr. visualise trails, everything trailing.

welcome to bluelight :)
 
the LSD experience within itself is a feeling of novelty. Then again, to quote Lemmy from Motorhead "one day I got sick of watching the same movie over and over"
 
Anyo said:
If it really is that good, I think I've finally found the cure to my life long struggle with social anxiety.
Click to expand...

That's a thin line to walk..

Does the novelty wear off? I guess it depends on how deep you get into it.. towards the last days of my time with LSD my experiences would always shift in the direction of asking the fundamental question to my existence, a paradox within itself.. which in turn would create a thought-loop through which each answer was broken down by another question infinitely. This was unavoidable as everything in existence is systematically connected.. so music,people,food would all relate back to a singular point of infinity, which is impossible to grasp with LSD's analytical nature. It was exhausting.. lol

The early days though, sure i felt like a child in wonderland.. but over time curiosity became a serious pursuit of truth.
 
But a long stint of regular tripping twists your brain a bit. You start to fundamentally question reality and it's hard to interact with society on the same level that you used to.

Some psychedelics are worse than others in this respect. Tryptamines are more likely to cause it than Phenethylamines and top of the charts is LSD.
 
Nichols has a theory that the locus coeroleus in the brain is involved in signalling novelty, for example in the environment, to help guide attention. This brain region is thought (or perhaps shown) to be activated by psychedelics like LSD. Not sure if this is what you meant initially, I assume what was meant was the novelty óf LSD. Which may be directly related to the action on novelty detection.

Really though, in my experience all those things you describe get weaker because twice a month is frequently even if you don't think so. I think it will always lose novelty, only not noticeably when you only do it like twice a year because there is too much other novelty in between that makes you kind of forget about what LSD does. At this point I have partially forgotten since I took such a long break, and I notice the anticipating anxiety of the unknown is returning to me similar to what I felt before I ever tried it.

The relative novelty of LSD itself can wear off to some extent although not completely compared to sobriety, but if what Nichols thinks is true that action should not disappear but only attenuate after chronic exposure.

I find DMT to be more remarkably novel each time, where with LSD I am less anticipating after a while since I am getting used to that kind of experience, with DMT it is just too much mileage in too little time when smoked and it tends to surprise me much more. This probably changes as well for people who smoke DMT very chronically.
 
It`s quite a personal question, I think for some people the novelty of acid wears off, for others it doesn`t, and some others find themselves in some experiences that get too intense for them wanting to cross that barrier again (as Watts said, When you got the message, hang up the phone, but that`s also a personal statement that works for some and not for others).

IME, though, I`d say you`re unlikely to use LSD twice a month for two years, but it`s hardly predictable.
 
I found the novelty of LSD wore off when I began tripping at least once a week, this was around 2 years ago and I ended up taking a few months break afterwards because trips were becoming extremely short visually and there wasn't much of an introspective headspace, more a fucked up feeling. However when I started tripping again after the break things were back to normal and my trips were like they used to be. Although now I tend to space them out a bit more.
 
SpecialK_ said:
I found the novelty of LSD wore off when I began tripping at least once a week, this was around 2 years ago and I ended up taking a few months break afterwards because trips were becoming extremely short visually and there wasn't much of an introspective headspace, more a fucked up feeling. However when I started tripping again after the break things were back to normal and my trips were like they used to be. Although now I tend to space them out a bit more.
Click to expand...

How long of a break did you have to take to get the same feeling again as before? How far apart do you space them now?
 
It depends on how long you keep up that pace, but, for me, the main thing that will determine the effects is still set and setting rather than frequency of use when I am tripping often. If you do the same things in the same place every time you take lsd, you're trips will be less exciting. Try doing something different. Walk through the woods. Dance. Have sex. Lay motionless in a quiet, dark room. Trip with others. Trip alone. Trip at night. Trip during the day. Try a different dose. Smoke some cannabis. Listen to music. Watch a movie. Read a book. Maybe try shrooms instead every once in a while.

But overall, tripping twice a month doesn't seem too often. Just don't expect the drug to do the work for you. You have to figure out how to make it consistently interesting.
 
How would you guys compare the novelty of your LSD experiences over time with the novelty of your cannabis experiences over time?

Pot was very trippy at first- I would get really nice visuals, euphoria, and an altered perception, but 5 years later- I no longer experience it that way. Now, I just use it to get me interested in certain things I normally wouldn't care about. It's almost as if it's a completely different drug now. I haven't used LSD long enough to compare, but I hope it doesn't go the same route.
 
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Well, compare the first time to the tenth time you've gone to an amusement park and get back to us. Drugs aren't these magical things that are immune to archetypical human experience....
 
Crashing said:
Well, compare the first time to the tenth time you've gone to an amusement park and get back to us. Drugs aren't these magical things that are immune to archetypical human experience....
Click to expand...

I think you're saying that it's not the drug that changes how it affects the person over time, but the person instead who decides that there is nothing the drug offers that they haven't already experienced before- this isn't what I experienced with cannabis after even a 3 month intermission.
 
I felt the novelty wore off after the first few times, then i took it quite a lot for a while after a break of a few months and although it was fun it never really delivered the way it did in the first few trips.

then i stopped taking it completely for over 10 years, when i did come back to it i was expecting it to have regained some of it's wonder after such a prolonged abstinence but again was somewhat dissapointed, nothing new to be found in it even after all those years.

Then i discovered Mushrooms - they have never failed to thrill, surprise and amaze me. - Every high dose journey begins with knees knocking.
 
webbykevin said:
I felt the novelty wore off after the first few times, then i took it quite a lot for a while after a break of a few months and although it was fun it never really delivered the way it did in the first few trips.

then i stopped taking it completely for over 10 years, when i did come back to it i was expecting it to have regained some of it's wonder after such a prolonged abstinence but again was somewhat dissapointed, nothing new to be found in it even after all those years.
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Can you tell me if any of the 4 qualities I mentioned above in the OP were missing?
 
Yes. The novelty definitely wears off. I spent about a year taking acid almost every weekend and towards the end I was actually starting to get kind of bored with the experience. Switching up your setting can help, but even then, the trips become pretty banal. There simply isn't enough happening in the average person's life (new experiences, new ideas, etc.) to bring new intellectual content into your trips at that sort of rate. As malakaix pointed out, you eventually get to a point where every crevice of your life has been analyzed so thoroughly that the whole process becomes dull and exhausting. You can then turn to analyzing the acid itself and trying to understand the way that it's interacting with the structures of your mind to bring forth the psychedelic state, but this makes the trips more predictable and never has quite the zing that identifying or resolving a deeply-seated personal issue can bring to your trip.

If you have problems with anxiety, I strongly recommend meditation. It works pretty well, and I find that it's very easy to pick up if you have a lot of trip experience.
 
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