Psychedelic Experiences and Mindfulness are Associated with Improved Wellbeing

The paper situates itself within renewed scientific and popular interest in psychedelics and in mindfulness-based contemplative practices. Earlier clinical research has shown that high-dose psychedelics (notably psilocybin) can occasion mystical-type experiences that are followed by persistent improvements in measures such as life meaning, spirituality and psychological functioning, while formal mindfulness interventions (for example MBSR, MBCT) have demonstrated small-to-moderate improvements in stress, depression and anxiety. The authors note phenomenological and neurobiological overlap between deep meditation and psychedelic states (for instance reductions in default mode network activity) and point out that a small number of studies suggest combined use may yield additive benefits. However, naturalistic data on recreational psychedelic use, everyday mindfulness practice and their joint associations with multi-dimensional wellbeing remain limited. Qiu and colleagues set out to address that gap by testing whether trait mindfulness and psychedelic-mediated mystical experience are associated with a broad range of wellbeing outcomes in a large, non-clinical sample. The study pre-registered seven hypotheses on OSF and used hierarchical regression to test whether mindfulness and mystical experience predict affect, meaning in life, life satisfaction, wisdom and symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, and whether psychedelic use moderates those relationships. The authors emphasise a naturalistic, cross-sectional approach to capture how people actually engage in meditation and recreational psychedelic use outside laboratory settings.

The investigators conducted a cross-sectional, online survey administered via Qualtrics. Participants were recruited from two sources: online interest communities (subreddits related to drugs, meditation and psychedelics; n = 1,019) and an internal Western University recruitment pool (largely undergraduates; n = 200), yielding a combined sample consistent with the N = 1,219 reported in the paper. The only formal inclusion criterion was competence in English. Participants provided informed consent and the study procedures were approved by the University of Western Ontario's Non-Medical Research Ethics Board; respondents could enter a raffle for one of three US$50 e-giftcards. Survey content captured self-reported meditation and psychedelic use (including age at first use, lifetime doses and estimated average dose for LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, mescaline and MDMA), basic COVID-19 screening items and a battery of validated psychometric scales. Trait mindfulness was measured with the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ, 39 items; α = 0.91). Mystical experience was assessed using a revised 30-item Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ; α = 0.97), with participants asked to rate their most meaningful experience. Wellbeing and related outcomes included the shortened DASS-21 for depression, anxiety and stress (total α = 0.93), PANAS for positive and negative affect (positive α = 0.89, negative α = 0.90), Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ; presence α = 0.88, search α = 0.90), Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; α = 0.87), and a Brief Wisdom Screening Scale (BWSS; α = 0.85). Analytically, the authors pre-registered hierarchical multiple regression as their primary approach. They fit three successive regression models to examine incremental variance explained by mindfulness and mystical experience, comparing models via analysis of variance. Assumptions for linear regression were assessed: homoscedasticity was tested with Levene's test and, where violated, White's robust standard errors were applied; the authors noted that large sample size mitigates some normality concerns and evaluated linearity visually with residuals-vs-fitted plots. Psychedelic use and meditation practice were coded as binary moderators in interaction tests; several exploratory analyses (not pre-registered) examined additional interactions and subgroup comparisons. One pre-registered hypothesis (H7) was not tested and is reported as a deviation from protocol.

Sample characteristics reported in the extracted text indicate an average age of 25.0 years (SD = 8.6). Self-reported religiosity averaged 24.1/100 (SD = 26.0) and spirituality 54.8/100 (SD = 28.8). Psychedelic users reported a mean age of first use of 19.7 years (SD = 6.1) and highly variable lifetime dose counts (M = 43.3, SD = 53.0). Recruitment sources were imbalanced (1,019 online; 200 internal). On the primary analyses, trait mindfulness (FFMQ) explained significant variation across the wellbeing measures. Higher mindfulness predicted greater positive affect, lower negative affect, higher wisdom (BWSS), lower mood disorder symptoms (DASS), and greater satisfaction with life (SWLS). The one pre-registered exception was meaning in life, where the hypothesised effect for mindfulness did not uniformly hold (the extracted text indicates an exception regarding meaning in life but does not provide detailed coefficients for that outcome). Mystical experience (MEQ) generally predicted wellbeing outcomes in the same direction as mindfulness but to a lesser extent; however, an unexpected association emerged whereby mystical experience per se predicted higher negative affect and greater mood disorder symptom scores. Crucially, psychedelic use moderated several of these relationships. When mystical experience was moderated by psychedelic use (psychedelic use coded as a binary variable), the interaction predicted increases in wisdom (ß = 0.24, t = 3.25, p = .001) and satisfaction with life (ß = 0.19, t = 2.28, p = .02). The psychedelic-by-MEQ interaction also predicted reductions in DASS total scores (ß = -0.33, t = -3.94, p < .001) and lower negative affect on PANAS (ß = -0.31, t = -3.72, p < .001). No significant psychedelic-moderated MEQ effects were found for PANAS positive or for the MLQ subscales (presence and search). An interaction between psychedelic use and mindfulness was found for positive affect: psychedelic moderated mindfulness predicted increased positive affect (PANAS positive ß = 0.16, t = 2.29, p = .02). By contrast, meditation practice (coded as >1 year versus <1 year) did not interact with either FFMQ or MEQ to predict wellbeing outcomes. Exploratory subgroup comparisons showed that experienced participants (both psychedelic users and meditators) scored higher on mindfulness and mystical experience than naive participants; the difference for mindfulness was medium in size, while mystical experience showed large effect-size differences. Substance use patterns reported: among the five substances listed (LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, DMT, mescaline), 13.7% of psychedelic users had tried only one, 21.0% tried exactly two, 29.1% tried three, 28.0% tried four, 5.8% tried all five, and 28.3% reported not having used any of the five (this latter figure likely reflects how the question was answered or inclusion of other substances). Mean self-reported doses (in conventional units) were reported for each substance (for example LSD M = 188 µg, SD = 99; mushrooms M = 2.84 g, SD = 1.23; MDMA M = 131 mg, SD = 71; DMT M = 33.3 mg, SD = 18.9; mescaline M = 273 mg, SD = 181). The authors additionally report high internal reliability for all psychometric scales used.

Qiu and colleagues interpret their results as evidence that trait mindfulness is robustly associated with a broad conception of wellbeing in a non-clinical, naturalistic sample. The pattern that higher mindfulness predicts greater presence of meaning but less searching for meaning is discussed in light of Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory (MMT); the authors suggest that regular mindful attention may foster reappraisal and emotional regulation that yields a felt presence of meaning and reduces the ongoing search for it, possibly via nondual states in which seeking diminishes. The discussion frames mystical experience as positively related to wisdom and to search for meaning, proposing that psychedelic-elicited mystical experiences may prompt people to seek meaning or that people use psychedelics to seek answers. The authors note a novel and important nuance: mystical experiences that occur independently of psychedelics were associated with higher negative affect and mood disorder symptoms in this sample, whereas mystical experiences occurring in the context of psychedelic use were associated with improved mood outcomes. Thus, psychedelic moderation appeared to invert the adverse association between mystical experience and negative mood. Overlap between meditators and psychedelic users (58% of participants reported both) is acknowledged as a likely contributor to group differences, with both experienced meditators and psychedelic users exhibiting higher mindfulness and mystical experience scores than naive participants. Strengths emphasised include the large sample, the simultaneous assessment of mindfulness and psychedelic-related mystical experience across multiple wellbeing domains, and the naturalistic focus outside laboratory settings. Key limitations noted by the authors are the cross-sectional, correlational design that precludes causal inference; the asymmetrical recruitment sources which may limit generalisability (online interest forums versus a WEIRD undergraduate pool); and data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic, which could have introduced unmeasured confounds. The authors caution against causal claims and characterise their findings as associations that justify further longitudinal or experimental work.

In conclusion, the study reports that trait mindfulness is strongly associated with multiple indices of wellbeing in a large, non-clinical sample, and that mystical experience relates to several wellbeing facets but shows a complex relationship with negative affect that is moderated by psychedelic use. When mystical experiences are tied to psychedelic use they are associated with improved mood and greater life satisfaction and wisdom; mystical experiences unconnected to psychedelics showed an association with higher negative mood in this dataset. The authors conclude that both mindfulness and psychedelic-moderated mystical experiences exhibit strong positive associations with multifaceted measures of wellbeing in naturalistic contexts, while emphasising the correlational nature of the findings and the need for further research.