psychoactive drugs are a whole different category. You bring your whole mental baggage with you when you take them, unlike aspirin.
Also, just to be clear, I don't think you're saying that you have to be in a special frame of mind for psychoactive drugs to make a difference. For example, I've been told that homeopathy doesn't work for me because I "don't believe in it", but I'm pretty sure that a sufficient dose of psilocybin would get me just as high as anyone else (modulo tolerance), belief or no belief.
Any neuroticism can bubble to the surface and you might find yourself obsessing over a bad habit you have instead of enjoying the mystery and pattern of the universe.
For example I’ve twice taken mushrooms while I was lonely. About 1 gram. In both cases I ended up just feeling an amplified sense of loneliness that was very difficult to handle. Another time, and this wasn’t particularly bad, but I ended up thinking about my parents dying (they’re still alive) and it was a powerful feeling. That was good though, because after that I began to put more effort in to seeing them and spending time with them.
But my point is that the experience is a powerful mental experience that is affected by what is on your mind. So they strongly recommend only doing a trip if you have a good mindset and a good setting to do so. Otherwise wait.
By the way the parent comment is correct. Psychedelics bring up a powerful feeling of connectedness with the universe. You feel like you’re seeing patterns of the matter around you and you feel one with it all. I’m not a mystical person but that’s how I’ve felt on a strong trip.
Whereas the OP (root of the thread) is talking about microdosing, which is, if I understand it correctly, taking drugs in an attempt to not get high, but get other benefits?
As to the "powerful feeling of connectedness with the universe", well, I've been drunk and I found that I loved everybody around me and I felt a strong emotional connection with total strangers. But, I was drunk. It's relaxing, it's disinhibiting, it's fun, it's making yourself deliberately and temporarily mentally impaired, why not? But there's nothing more to it.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the defining characteristic of intoxication, in my experience, is of being dumber than usual, which can be suprisingly enjoyable. Certainly not something to be desired as a constant state, though.
To clarify, as far as I understand, "set and setting" matters when taking psilocybin to get high, but microdosing is taking psilocybin (or other similar drugs) to very deliberatly not get high.
So what does "set and setting" have to do with microdosing, and why doesn't it matter with aspirin, which also doesn't get you high?
Now I've never microdosed mushrooms, but it's not hard for me to imagine that this same concept applies, of actively pursuing a good experience, which can steer that experience in a good direction. It will just be at a much smaller scale.
For myself I think of this phenomenon as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (not meant as a judgement about others) which helps me to keep in mind that I'm the one in control (assuming doses are not excessively high, I think others in this thread call those "heroic doses").
So I really don’t see it as “getting high”, and that’s why people call it a trip rather than getting high.
My point about the connectedness is that it’s not mysticism, that’s just how people really feel. Don’t misunderstand those descriptions as the person being more mystical than you. That’s how you’d feel on the right dose of mushrooms too.
Whereas psychoactive drugs generally affect the actual underlying processes in the brain through various interactions with receptor, enzymes, or neurotransmitters.
I hope that distinction makes sense.