Welcome to
Chemical Collective

Are you 18 or older?

Please confirm that your are 18 years of age or older.

You are not allowed to access the page.

Friendly customer service available 9am-5pm Monday to Friday

Free standard shipping over €50 and free tracked shipping over €100

Cart

Your cart is empty

Tripping While Sleep-Deprived: What You Need to Know

in this article
  • Introduction
  • The Risks of Tripping While Sleep Deprived
  • Other Downsides of Tripping While Sleep Deprived
  • How Sleep Deprivation Can Alleviate Depression
  • More Intense Trips
  • What if You Struggle With Insomnia?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Chemical Collective or any associated parties.

Introduction

‘Set’ – what you as an individual bring to a psychedelic experience – plays a significant role in how a specific trip will turn out. This one half of ‘set and setting’ (the latter encompassing environmental factors) is often framed as your mood and emotional state going into an experience. Do you feel positive and excited, or low and fearful?

Crucially, however, our current physical state is entwined with the mental – and in this vein, we cannot discuss what an ‘ideal set’ for tripping involves without mentioning sleep. How well-rested you are, as we all know, impacts your mood, which will therefore play out in the quality of a psychedelic experience. 

But as with any aspect of set, there is no guarantee that sleep deprivation – like low mood – will always produce negative experiences. In a previous post [1], I explored what I call the paradox of set: negative frames of mind can be both worsened and alleviated during and after psychedelic journeys. Indeed, while tripping when sleep-deprived should understandably be cautioned against (it’s safer and typically more enjoyable to trip when rested), this physical (and mental) state can sometimes – strangely – benefit a psychedelic experience.

The Risks of Tripping While Sleep Deprived

Many people have taken psychedelics after one or two nights of insufficient (or disrupted) sleep, or even after no sleep at all, and still nonetheless had enjoyable experiences. However, doing this is risky. If psychedelics can magnify your current state, then feelings of fatigue, lethargy, low mood, and irritability owing to sleep deprivation can become even more noticeable and unpleasant. 

We know from a wealth of research that both acute and chronic sleep deprivation [2] are linked to increases in negative mood and confusion, as well as impaired emotional processing, including frustration tolerance and coping capacities. Sleep deprivation can, therefore, not only worsen your mood and encourage negative thinking but can also make it more difficult to deal with frustrating situations and negative emotions during the day (anyone who struggles with sleep can tell you this).

Tripping while sleep-deprived, then, certainly increases the risk of experiencing negative moments during a trip, as well as having long stretches – or even an entire trip – characterised by physical and mental discomfort. 

While getting a few hours of sleep a night or two may lead to an uncomfortable psychedelic experience, not sleeping at all can be even riskier. Severe sleep loss – going 24 hours or longer without sleep, as some people do at festivals or raves – can result in hallucinations, perceptual (visual, auditory, somatosensory) distortions, anxiety, irritability, depersonalisation, temporal disorientation, and disordered thoughts [3]. Psychedelics have the potential to magnify these effects. The result then would be a much more intense trip than one anticipated. A moderate dose of a psychedelic combined with sleep deprivation could produce an unexpectedly strong experience – visually, emotionally, and somatically. If you aren’t prepared for this possibility and don’t desire it, you may end up feeling overwhelmed and destabilised.

Other Downsides of Tripping While Sleep Deprived

Besides emotional distress, tripping while sleep-deprived can entail other downsides. Poor sleep impairs a range of cognitive functions [4], including attention, concentration, memory, problem-solving, creativity, emotional processing, and judgement. These negative cognitive effects can diminish the quality of a psychedelic experience. 

If you’re sleep-deprived, it can be harder to pay attention to what is occurring during the trip (which may be highly valuable and memorable), and you may also be more likely to forget what occurred in terms of the visions, thoughts, and insights you had. In this way, you might potentially lose out on some therapeutic benefit, especially since integration – fundamentally – requires that you’re able to consolidate and recall meaningful moments during your trip.

Moreover, there is research suggesting that sleep deprivation increases the formation of false memories [5]. Other studies show that even if you get plenty of total hours of sleep, if that sleep is fragmented (multiple night waking), then this can also impair memory consolidation [6]. So, you can improve your recall (and therefore integration) of psychedelic trips by ensuring you don’t just get enough sleep but that you get quality (uninterrupted) sleep. 

In addition, sleep deprivation can impair cognitive flexibility [7], which means a reduced ability to adapt and thrive in uncertain or changing circumstances. And isn’t a psychedelic experience precisely this kind of circumstance? This is yet another reason why being well-rested before a trip will benefit you – it will put you in a better position to handle the unpredictable subjective changes that can occur.

A 1970 study [8] on the effect of LSD on sleep-deprived men (who hadn’t slept for one or two nights) found that:

“the onset of characteristic LSD behavior and attention impairments was more rapid in those men who received LSD after loss of sleep than in the drug-alone group; the sleep-loss-LSD subjects showed inaccuracies in problem solving and vigilance tests not present in the controls; and the men who received LSD after two nights’ loss of sleep showed increases in pulse rate, pupil size, and 3-hour plasma levels of LSD when compared with those subject groups which received the drug alone and the drug after one night’s sleep loss.”

It’s interesting that 3-hour plasma levels of LSD were higher in those subjects who didn’t sleep for two nights: this suggests a pharmacological factor, separate from the subjective effects of sleep deprivation, that contribute to a more intense trip.

 

How Sleep Deprivation Can Alleviate Depression

While personal experience and research tell us sleep deprivation will worsen our mood, sleep deprivation can also be therapeutically used to treat depression [9]. This is known as wake therapy. Indeed, sometimes you may have an experience of not getting enough sleep yet finding yourself in good spirits. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of the antidepressant effect of wake therapy are largely unknown. Wake therapy can involve partial sleep deprivation (4-6 hours of sleep a night) or total sleep deprivation (staying up for more than 24 consecutive hours, typically about 36 hours). 

So, if after one, two, or more nights of partial sleep deprivation you feel an enhanced mood, then you could end up having a positive psychedelic experience. This doesn’t mean, however, that you won’t be cognitively impaired. That’s worth bearing in mind. Also, while total sleep deprivation could put you in a better frame of mind than you would be if you slept normally, there is still a greater chance of experiencing more intense subjective effects.

You should be careful if you try to self-administer wake therapy, as partial or total sleep deprivation does not guarantee an alleviation of depression. It’s important to maintain self-awareness and understand how you’re feeling on the day you plan to trip. Check-in with yourself and, if you’re ‘feeling off’, it may be best to postpone your trip. Also, chronic sleep deprivation is not helpful for depression, and it can increase anxiety and aggression [10], so you should avoid tripping if you’re currently experiencing that.

More Intense Trips

As we have seen, tripping when you haven’t got enough sleep may increase the intensity of a psychedelic experience. But this isn’t necessarily a negative. If you expect this to occur, or even if you don’t, you may be more likely to experience mystical effects like ego dissolution.

On the other hand, while research has correlated [11] mystical experiences with the positive mental health outcomes of psychedelic therapy, we cannot conclude from this that mystical effects (i.e. ego dissolution, unity, a sense of the divine) cause improvements in mental health. As renowned psychedelic researcher Rick Strassman points out [12], it may be that it is the intensity of the experience, rather than any specific quality, that is important in terms of recovering from depression or addiction, for instance. Nonetheless, if intensity – be that of a perceptual, emotional, somatic, or cognitive nature – is critical, then sleep deprivation could aid in achieving that.

It’s also possible that if you do struggle with states like fatigue, overwhelm, and negativity during a trip, brought on by sleep deprivation, this may provide a challenge to overcome. And by overcoming it, you might learn a lesson about why it’s better to accept and embrace discomfort rather than resist it. However, this does not mean you should then purposefully put yourself in a bad mindset before tripping just because there may be some suffering to deal with; this would be reckless and only increase the chances of having an unnecessarily negative experience, which may also lead to persistent adverse effects when the trip ends.

What if You Struggle With Insomnia?

When it comes to preparing patients for psychedelic therapy, I’ve sometimes wondered how much attention is paid to how well the participants have slept the night before. Since sleep issues like insomnia (struggling to fall/stay asleep) often feature [13] in depression and anxiety, do many depressed patients, therefore, begin their psychedelic sessions in a less-than-ideal, sleep-deprived state? Since the prospect of a high-dose trip can be daunting (especially for a naïve user), will this disrupt sleep even further?

If you struggle with insomnia but want to trip, this presents a kind of catch-22. A positive psychedelic experience can help alleviate the depression and anxiety causing insomnia, but insomnia may lend itself to a negative psychedelic experience, which carries a risk of worsening one’s mental health. Nonetheless, we have clearly seen from clinical trials that depressed patients experience significant and lasting relief [14], and some of these patients may have had insomnia as a core symptom of their depression.

Of course, a ‘perfect set’ can never be achieved. And even when you feel at your most prepared and rested, that doesn’t mean that circumstances will align so you can go ahead with a trip (you might be busy on that day or you may not have space for yourself). If you struggle with insomnia and fatigue, you can still be prepared for a psychedelic experience. These issues don’t have to prevent you from tripping. However, for the sake of harm reduction, it’s still crucial that you practise good sleep hygiene and be as rested as possible. You want to feel ready to experience a full range of psychedelic effects, as well as be able to approach the experience with a positive and open attitude (which is still possible even if you struggle with sleep). 

If you wake up feeling particularly groggy and cranky, and these feelings persist throughout the morning, then you might benefit by tripping on another day. This waiting will pay off. Not only can you potentially avoid a difficult psychedelic experience, but when you do have the sort of therapeutic experience you’ve wanted, your mental health (and your sleep) will have a better chance of improving in the long term.

Sam Woolfe | Community Blogger at Chemical Collective

Sam is one of our community bloggers here at Chemical Collective. If you’re interested in joining our blogging team and getting paid to write about subjects you’re passionate about, please reach out to David via email at blog@chemical-collective.com

share your toughts

Join the Conversation.

6 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Maggi
1 year ago

This is a fairly articulated piece of writing there, where from a personal experience your body needs to fully active to really absorb the lessons from a trip, rather than just crashing in the bed from the exhaustion, its much more sacred of a thing for me IMO.

Marc91
1 year ago

Schlafentzug ( 36h+ ) auch ohne die Einnahme psychoaktiver Substanzen kann einen meiner Meinung nach in bewusstseinserweiterte Zustände versetzen.

Korcorpse
1 year ago

Really good written article, nice job

Flub
1 year ago

I have tripped on L very hard after about 4 hours in 48 hours I only took 1 hit and I had really vivid visuals and couldn’t comprehend typing hardly… I enjoyed it but it was also semi dysphoric.

Jambonkoko
1 year ago

Dissociative while sleep deprived can be overwhelming for the body and dangerous especially for the heart so be careful

LatinResearcher
1 year ago

This is interesting, years ago i dropped after a full week of finals (barely had any sleep) and the experience was indeed way more intense than expected and at the same time, way more exhausting than expecting.

Related articles

our products

Related products

1D-LSD 150mcg Blotters From 29.00
(64)
2-FDCK HCL From 10.00
(70)
1V-LSD 150mcg Blotters From 22.00
(123)
DMXE HCL From 16.00
(43)
4-HO-MET Fumarate 20mg Pellets From 18.00
(31)
1cP-LSD 100mcg Blotters From 18.00
(122)
1D-LSD 10mcg Micro Pellets From 12.00
(20)
1cP-LSD 10mcg Micro Pellets From 12.50
(20)
3-MeO-PCE HCL From 15.00
(10)
person
Mark G
5 days ago
Excellent people to deal with,will buy again soon. Very Happy.
person
Michael K
5 days ago
Everything was perfect. Will definitely buy some more in future. ❤️
person
Mark S
6 days ago
As always. Fast delivery and great product quality!
person
David W
7 days ago
Easy ordering, great customer service, superb substance quality – I’m a happy customer, and likely will be for the years to come.
person
A S
10 days ago
Always a total Pleasure to deal with ! Everything to date has been 100% as described, and of the highest quality, and arrives in a most discrete fashion,, much love to CC xx
person
Customer
11 days ago
Hello, I have already ordered twice from you and I am very satisfied with your services.
person
Julia S
11 days ago
very nice
person
Michael
12 days ago
Ordered 5MEODMT. Product was incredibly pure and the finest I've ever seen. Delivery was done well, just as it should be. Truly impressed by the professionalism and incredibly high quality of the product. My sincerest gratitude and thanks.
person
Oded L
12 days ago
Shipped super fast, nice and discreet. Thank you guys.
person
stefan f
12 days ago
trustworthy, good service
person
Danijel P
13 days ago
It was all great till this time. I ordered some mandala t-shirt and never recive it. But till this time everything was fine everytime
person
Ballien
13 days ago
I absolutely applaud the very high quality work ...the web pages are absolutely professional and easy to read and learn ... the products are in perfect order with high quality ...I have nothing to add and I applaud the excellent work of the whole team ...thank you 😇👍👏
person
Valentin L
13 days ago
I had a problem with the delivery of my package but they've been very quick to respond and addresse my issue. They've reshiped me as soon as it was possible and now I look forward to test their quality.
person
Virgile P
13 days ago
I couldn't hope for a better service. Thanks a lot !
person
Julie N
14 days ago
Very secure delivery and top quality of products. Easy to find all the info you need. I found my shop, thanks!
person
Michael H
14 days ago
Amazing products and fast delivery. Can’t complain about anything looking forward to the next order
person
Giusti Y
16 days ago
Very good products, and astounding customer support ! I had a problem with a payment, end they helped me while being kind and thoughtful. The best customer support I have ever see !
person
Josue M
16 days ago
they are wonderful and reliable
person
Pau P
17 days ago
Non tracked delivery within one week in Spain and good quality products!

Lots of love
from Jack, Jessica, Gigi and Matt

rewards-icon
popup-logo

Reward program

popup-close
  • Earn
  • Affiliates