Can psychedelic use benefit meditation practice? Examining individual, psychedelic, and meditation-related factors.

Most meditators who also use psychedelics report that the drugs improve their meditation practice. In a survey of 863 regular meditators who had used psychedelics, 73.5% said psychedelics positively influenced the quality of their meditation. Machine learning analysis of 53 variables identified the strongest predictors of this perceived benefit: greater frequency of psychedelic use, setting intentions before taking psychedelics, having an agreeable personality, and having used N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (N,N-DMT). The results suggest that individual traits and patterns of use shape whether psychedelics are seen as helpful for meditation, but causality cannot be established from this cross-sectional data.

Study at a glance

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Meditation practice and psychedelic use have attracted increasing attention in the public sphere and scientific research. Both methods induce non-ordinary states of consciousness that may have significant therapeutic benefits. Thus, there is growing scientific interest in potential synergies between psychedelic use and meditation practice with some research suggesting that psychedelics may benefit meditation practice. The present study examined individual, psychedelic-related, and meditation-related factors to determine under what conditions meditators perceive psychedelic use as beneficial for their meditation practice. METHOD: Participants (N = 863) who had reported psychedelic use and a regular meditation practice (at least 3 times per week during the last 12 months) were included in the study. To accommodate a large number of variables, machine learning (i.e., elastic net, random forest) was used to analyze the data. RESULTS: Most participants (n = 634, 73.5%) found psychedelic use to have a positive influence on their quality of meditation. Twenty-eight variables showed significant zero-order associations with perceived benefits even following a correction. Elastic net had the best performance (R2 = .266) and was used to identify the most important features. Across 53 variables, the model found that greater use of psychedelics, intention setting during psychedelic use, agreeableness, and exposure to N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (N,N-DMT) were most likely to be associated with the perception that psychedelics benefit meditation practice. The results were consistent across several different approaches used to identify the most important variables (i.e., Shapley values, feature ablation). DISCUSSION: Results suggest that most meditators found psychedelic use to have a positive influence on their meditation practice, with: 1) regularity of psychedelic use, 2) the setting of intentions for psychedelic use, 3) having an agreeable personality, and 4) reported use of N,N-DMT being the most likely predictors of perceiving psychedelic use as beneficial. Longitudinal designs and randomized trials manipulating psychedelic use are needed to establish causality.