Microdosing has gone from fringe curiosity to dinner-table conversation in about a decade. Software engineers in San Francisco do it. So do schoolteachers in Berlin, retired nurses in Lisbon, and people quietly trying to climb out of a depressive patch without quitting their day job. The premise is simple enough: take a sliver of a psychedelic — small enough that you won't trip, often enough that the effects supposedly stack — and see if life gets a little easier to move through.

But the practical questions are the ones nobody answers well. How often? For how long? Which substance? And how do you know if it's actually doing anything, or if you've just talked yourself into feeling better? If you're weighing microdosing as a tool — maybe alongside therapy, maybe as a curious experiment, maybe as a softer entry point before considering a full plant-medicine retreat — here's an honest look at what people actually do.

What microdosing actually is (and isn't)

A microdose is a sub-perceptual dose of a psychedelic — usually between one-tenth and one-twentieth of what you'd take to have a full experience. The whole point is that you shouldn't really feel it. No visuals. No ego dissolution. No staring at the ceiling wondering why your couch is breathing. If you're noticing strong effects, you've taken too much.

What people report instead is something quieter. A slight lift in mood. Easier focus. A little more patience with their kids or their inbox. A creative problem they'd been stuck on for weeks suddenly cracking open on a Tuesday afternoon. The published research is still catching up — and some of the larger studies have suggested placebo accounts for a fair chunk of the reported benefit — but the anecdotal pile is enormous, and the practice clearly isn't going away.

People microdose for a long list of reasons. The most common ones cluster around mood, focus, creativity, and reducing cravings — the latter being one of the more interesting threads, since classical psychedelics have shown real promise in clinical trials for addiction recovery. Some users report fewer migraines, others say it helps with the dull edge of menstrual pain. Your mileage will vary. Honestly.

Which substances people actually microdose

The two heavy hitters are psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and LSD. Both have been studied more than the alternatives, both are relatively well-understood at low doses, and both have clear-enough protocols to follow without flying blind.

• Psilocybin: A typical microdose is 0.1 to 0.3 grams of dried mushrooms. Popular for general mood lift and emotional openness. Easy to portion if you use a decent scale.
• LSD: Roughly 10 to 20 micrograms. Favoured by the focus-and-creativity crowd. Trickier to dose precisely without volumetric dilution.
• Iboga (ibogaine): Microdoses of iboga have a small but devoted following, particularly among people working on addiction patterns. This one needs serious caution — ibogaine has cardiac risks and isn't to be played with casually.
• DMT and changa: Less common for microdosing because the half-life is so short, but some people experiment with low oral doses for mood and presence.

Each substance has its own character. Psilocybin tends to feel warmer and more emotional. LSD feels more clear and stimulant-adjacent. Iboga is in a different league entirely — closer to a master plant than a recreational compound, and worth treating with the respect that implies. Don't assume your experience with one transfers to another.

How much is a microdose, really?

The standard answer — one-tenth to one-twentieth of a full dose — is useful as a starting point but lies to you about the precision involved. Mushrooms vary wildly batch to batch. Two grams of one flush might hit harder than three grams of another. LSD blotters are notoriously inconsistent unless you trust the source completely.

The most useful exercise before you settle into a schedule is finding your threshold dose — the smallest amount at which you can clearly feel something. Take it on a quiet day with nothing on your calendar. Then keep stepping down on subsequent occasions until you find the dose where the effects fade into background hum. Your microdose lives just below that line.

This sounds tedious, and it is. But the alternative is dosing in the dark and either feeling nothing for weeks (too low) or finding yourself slightly altered during a work meeting (too high — and yes, this happens to people more often than they admit).

The two main schedules — Fadiman and Stamets

There are essentially two protocols that everyone in this space references. Knowing both gives you a sensible starting framework.

The Fadiman protocol

Dr James Fadiman, who's been researching psychedelics since the 1960s, is the closest thing microdosing has to a patriarch. His protocol is the original and still the most widely followed:

• One day on, two days off — so you microdose every third day.
• Run the cycle for roughly four to ten weeks.
• Take the dose in the morning. Go about your normal day. Journal.

The logic behind the spacing is twofold. Psychedelics build tolerance fast, and the dead days let your receptors reset. The two-day gap also lets you notice carryover effects — many people report a subtle lift the day after a dose, sometimes even two days after. If you microdosed daily, you'd never see the contrast.

The Stamets stack

Mycologist Paul Stamets developed an alternative protocol specifically for psilocybin: four days on, three days off. He pairs the psilocybin with lion's mane mushroom and a flush dose of niacin (vitamin B3), with the theory that the three compounds together support neurogenesis. The science here is preliminary at best, and plenty of people drop the niacin and lion's mane and just use the four-on-three-off rhythm.

The Stamets approach is more intensive than Fadiman's. Some people find it works beautifully; others say they hit tolerance quickly and lose the effect. Worth experimenting with if Fadiman feels too sparse.

Other workable patterns

Some folks just microdose Monday through Friday and rest on weekends. Others do every other day. The non-negotiable rule across every credible protocol: don't microdose every single day. You'll either build tolerance and stop noticing anything, or you'll start to feel the substance creep into your baseline in ways that aren't useful.

How long should you stick with it?

Give it at least a month. Microdosing isn't a same-day painkiller — it's more like a slow rearrangement of mood and patterns that you only notice in hindsight. If you're three weeks in and convinced nothing's happening, read back through your journal. Often something has shifted; you just couldn't see it from inside the week.

Fadiman recommends a ten-week cycle, then a meaningful break — at least a few weeks, ideally longer — before deciding whether to start another round. The break matters. It lets you see what's actually you versus what's the substance, and it prevents the practice from quietly becoming a daily prop you can't function without.

Practical things people learn the hard way

A few honest notes from people who've been at this a while:

1. Source matters more than schedule. Unreliable material means unreliable doses, and unreliable doses mean you're essentially guessing every time. If you can't trust where it came from, the rest of this is moot.
2. Journal, even when you don't feel like it. The changes are subtle by design. Without a written record, you'll forget what your baseline felt like and have no way to assess whether the experiment is working.
3. Set an intention before you start. Not in a mystical way — just clarity. Are you trying to lift a flat mood? Break a creative block? Reduce alcohol cravings? Without a target, you can't tell if you've hit it.
4. Watch for tolerance. If the effects fade after a few weeks on the same dose, that's tolerance, not failure. Take a longer break rather than upping the dose.
5. It's not a substitute for treatment. If you're working through serious depression, trauma, or addiction, microdosing might support a recovery plan — but it's not a replacement for therapy, medical care, or, when appropriate, a properly held ceremonial experience.

Microdosing as one tool among many

For some people, microdosing is the gentle on-ramp that eventually leads them toward a fuller psychedelic experience — a guided psilocybin session, an ayahuasca retreat, an ibogaine programme for addiction. For others, it stays a low-key background practice that helps them function a little better through ordinary life. Neither path is wrong. The honest truth is that microdosing alone rarely produces the kind of dramatic shift people sometimes claim — but as part of a broader effort to take your inner life seriously, it can be a useful piece.

If your curiosity is leaning toward something deeper than self-experimentation — a held container, experienced facilitators, the kind of work that asks more of you than a Tuesday morning dose — a range of psilocybin and plant-medicine retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. Start small either way. Pay attention. The substances aren't magic, but used thoughtfully they can help you notice things about yourself that were already there, waiting for the volume to come down enough to hear them.